Senior Engineering Manager, Ads Monetization

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.

About the role...

Duolingo's Monetization pillar builds the systems that fund our mission: from subscription packaging and advertising to ML-powered personalization and beyond. As a Senior Engineering Manager on Ads, you'll lead a cross-functional product engineering team responsible for growing and scaling Duolingo's ads business: bringing high-quality ads that delight learners, fit seamlessly into our product experience, and meaningfully contribute to Duolingo’s bottom line. Your team will own the systems behind ad serving, mediation and demand, in-product ad formats and surfaces, and more. You'll partner closely with product, design, data science, machine learning, and ad operations to define strategy and deliver results. Just as importantly, you'll create an environment where engineers do the best work of their careers — coaching, developing talent, and fostering a high-performing team culture.

🧠  You will...

• Co-lead a cross-functional pod with Product and Design to define strategy, success metrics, and an execution roadmap for Duolingo's ads business, balancing revenue growth with learner experience.
• Build and evolve the engineering systems that power ads at scale: ad serving and decisioning, mediation and bidding integrations, in-product ad formats and surfaces, and quality controls.
• Partner with design and product to ship ad experiences that feel native to Duolingo: delightful, well-paced, and respectful of the learner without compromising monetization performance.
• Collaborate with data science and ML partners to design experiments, apply personalization and targeting, and translate insights into product improvements and bookings growth.
• Own planning and execution for projects that directly impact revenue; identify the right team-level metrics to optimize and protect delivery through clear milestones and risk management.
• Bring both technical and product perspectives to new ideas, enabling rapid hypothesis testing without sacrificing reliability, observability, or long-term maintainability.
• Set and uphold engineering quality standards and practices that improve reliability, scalability, and operability across Ads systems.

✅  You have...

• Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers.
• Direct experience working on engineering teams that build and operate ads businesses, whether shipping ads in a consumer app or leading an ads engineering team.
• A track record of owning multi-engineer, multi-week technical projects to successful outcomes in a highly experimental, data-driven environment.
• Strong product instincts and excellent written/verbal communication, with experience aligning diverse stakeholders across engineering, product, design, and analytics.
• Experience working closely with data, experimentation, or machine learning teams to inform prioritization and ship measurable impact (direct ML expertise not required).
• Demonstrated ability to raise the bar on engineering practices for reliability, scalability, and observability.

⭐  Exceptional candidates will have...

• Deep experience with ad mediation, waterfall, and bidding systems (AdMob, GAM, Open Bidding, or equivalent), including onboarding and optimizing demand partners.
• A strong track record of designing or shipping in-product ad formats and surfaces in mobile apps, with attention to UX quality and format performance.
• Experience improving ad quality and monetization through experimentation, targeting, or programmatic levers, in partnership with business teams.
• Familiarity with COPPA-compliant or kid-friendly ad solutions and the trade-offs of untargeted inventory.
• Background collaborating with sales/biz ops on direct or programmatic campaigns and translating market feedback into product improvements.
• Experience leading teams that span multiple platforms (iOS, Android, backend) and partnering on ML-powered personalization within consumer apps.