Senior Software Engineer, Backend

About

Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. It’s a big mission, and that’s where you come in!

At Duolingo, you’ll join a team that cares about finding innovative solutions to complex technical problems, running countless experiments (300+ at a time!) with our massive user base to make data‑driven decisions, and educating our users and employees alike. You’ll have limitless learning opportunities, mentorship and collaboration with world‑class minds, and a variety of projects with large scopes — while doing work that’s both fun and meaningful.

Join our life‑changing mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world.

Teams We’re Hiring For

Core Service Infrastructure

The Core Service Infrastructure team builds and maintains the foundational systems that power Duolingo’s learning app at scale. The team defines and implements best practices to ensure that these critical services remain reliable, high‑performing, and easy to operate as the company grows. As a software engineer on the team, you’ll play a key role in building the next generation of these services while championing the adoption of next‑generation technologies that will power Duolingo’s continued growth.

Observability Team

This team builds infrastructure and tools that give engineers confidence and clarity at Duolingo scale. We create monitoring, alerting, and debugging experiences that help teams ship faster and respond to incidents effectively. In this team, you'll build instrumentation frameworks, deploy telemetry infrastructure, design dashboards, and connect signals to catch issues before they impact learners. We're looking for engineers passionate about developer experience and reliability.

DevX AI Team

The DevX AI team empowers engineers at Duolingo to be more effective by introducing AI‑infused tools that simplify workflows and reduce friction and toil. As a Software Engineer II on the team, you’ll contribute to building and improving AI‑driven developer tools used across Duolingo’s engineering organization. You’ll work on projects that improve day‑to‑day developer workflows. You will help build and maintain systems that integrate AI into the software lifecycle, including contributing to production MCP infrastructure that connects to AI coding agents, with a focus on reliability, usability, and measurable impact.

Responsibilities

🧠 You will...

• Collaborate on software projects with product design and backend aspects
• Develop, release, and maintain backend services and/or infrastructure
• Lead individual project priorities, milestones, and ensure we're always shipping
• Experience onboarding AI tools and changing engineering processes
• Focus on streamlining engineering processes with AI tools

Requirements

✅ You have...

• A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field
• Strong competencies in data structures, algorithms, and software design
• Experience programming in Java, Python, or Kotlin
• Solid understanding of one or more database technologies

Preferred Qualifications

⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...

• Industry experience building high‑traffic APIs using public cloud providers

Compensation

We post a multi‑level salary range for all of our roles. This is not inclusive of the rest of our awesome portfolio that includes equity compensation and world‑class benefits. Our salary ranges are the same for all US locations. Your recruiter can share more details about the range for a specific level during the hiring process. The actual salary within the range is determined by many factors including but not limited to, skills, experience, education, and internal equity.

Salary Range: $177,700—$240,400 USD

Benefits

Take a peek at how we care for our employees' holistic well‑being with our benefits here.

Interview Accommodations

We will do everything we can within reason to make sure that your interview takes place in an environment that fairly and accurately assesses your skills. If you need assistance or accommodation, please contact accommodations@duolingo.com.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Duolingo is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

Privacy

By applying for this position your data will be processed as per the Duolingo Applicant Privacy Notice.

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