Senior Engineering Manager, Monetization

About the role

The Monetization Pillar focuses on Duolingo's key business drivers—subscriptions, ads, and in-app purchases. Our goal is to build the best premium experiences for our learners while ensuring the sustainability and success of our business model. You will play an instrumental role in the strategic direction of Duolingo by developing and refining the methods that make our monetization efforts more effective and efficient.

Responsibilities

• Co-lead a cross-functional pod with Product and Design to define strategy, success metrics, and an execution roadmap for one of Duolingo’s Monetization teams.
• Partner with design and product to ship 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.

Requirements

• Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers, with demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain talent.
• Direct experience working on engineering teams that build and operate monetization systems.
• 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.
• Technical depth sufficient to guide architecture and implementation trade-offs, evolve quality standards, and mentor engineers on best practices.

Qualifications

• Deep experience with ad mediation, waterfall, and bidding systems (AdMob, GAM, Open Bidding, or equivalent), including onboarding and optimizing demand partners.
• 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.
• 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.

Skills

• Experience with ad mediation, waterfall, and bidding systems (AdMob, GAM, Open Bidding, or equivalent).
• Experience designing or shipping in-product ad formats and surfaces in mobile apps.
• Experience improving ad quality and monetization through experimentation, targeting, or programmatic levers.
• Experience collaborating with sales/biz ops on direct or programmatic campaigns.
• Experience leading teams that span multiple platforms (iOS, Android, backend).
• Experience with ML-powered personalization within consumer apps.

Benefits

We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support your well-being and career growth. Learn more about our benefits here.

Pay

The offered salary is dependent upon several factors, including work experience, skills, and internal peer comparisons. The posted range is subject to change in the future. For this role, base salary is supplemented by equity compensation.

Schedule

Details on the schedule will be provided during the interview process.