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Salary: USD 181,600 - 272,400 / annual
Duolingo is seeking a Staff Technical Program Manager (L4) to join its New York office and drive high-impact, cross-functional initiatives within the Growth pillar and across the broader engineering organization. This is a strategic role for someone who can operate at the organizational level—identifying opportunities, shaping programs, and delivering outcomes that matter to the business.
You will define and drive roadmaps for complex, cross-functional initiatives, aligning engineering and product leadership around shared vision and holding teams accountable to outcomes. You'll lead organizational change management as engineering teams adopt new ways of working, building alignment and helping teams internalize new processes and tooling. You'll operate with significant autonomy across multiple workstreams, serving as the connective tissue between Duolingo strategy and day-to-day execution.
Key responsibilities include partnering with engineering, product, data science, QA, and executive leadership to ensure communication and alignment; leveraging deep technical expertise to develop detailed plans with key milestones, identify and mitigate risks, and ensure timely launches. You'll drive decisions when difficult tradeoffs must be made, including those with cross-organizational or company-level impact. You'll identify systemic issues impacting delivery efficiency company-wide and take swift, collaborative action to resolve them. Additionally, you'll guide and develop other TPMs and engineering leads, scaling best practices across teams.
Duolingo operates at massive scale—running 300+ experiments at a time with a user base of half a billion learners. This role puts you at the center of a growing engineering and product presence in New York, building relationships with senior leaders and taking on high-ROI initiatives as they emerge.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Proven experience as a TPM, Engineering Lead, or Engineering Manager
- B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science or equivalent degree or experience
- Demonstrated experience leading large-scale technical transformation programs with measurable organizational impact—you've shifted how engineering organizations think and work, not just shipped projects
- Strong executive presence and influence in a matrix environment; able to build conviction among skeptics, align competing priorities across senior leadership, and drive decisions without direct authority
- Deep technical credibility—enough to challenge architectural assumptions, spot delivery risks early, and earn the trust of strong engineers
- Proven ability to build and implement detailed plans that account for ambiguity, dependencies, and technical complexity; ability to re-plan quickly when things change without losing team confidence or momentum
- Track record of standing up new programs or practices from scratch in ambiguous, high-visibility environments
- Ability to relocate to NYC
EXCEPTIONAL CANDIDATES WILL HAVE:
- Strong knowledge of software engineering, systems engineering, or similar hands-on technical experience in addition to program management experience
- Strong conceptual fluency in LLM-based products and AI infrastructure—enough to ask the right questions, challenge technical assumptions, and identify delivery risks
- Experience running programs that include machine learning, large datasets, or AI/ML infrastructure
- Experience working with AWS at scale
