Senior AI Engineering Manager

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

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Video Call Model Team, the group responsible for building the AI models that power our real-time communication experience. This team develops and maintains our in-house speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and small fine-tuned LLM models, which enable high-quality, low-latency audio and conversational features in our product. In this role, you will define the technical direction for these core model capabilities, guide a growing team of engineering and AI experts, and partner closely with product and infrastructure teams to bring advanced ML technologies to millions of users. This is a high-impact, in-person leadership role where you will shape the future of AI-first products within the company.

:brain: You will...

• Lead and mentor an 8–10 person team of ML engineers and researchers; recruit and develop top talent as the team grows.
• Drive the technical roadmap for our AI models, from research prototyping all the way to production deployment.
• Oversee end-to-end ML model development, ensuring models meet performance, latency, scalability, and reliability requirements
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, design, and infrastructure teams to translate product requirements into effective ML solutions.
• Establish strong ML engineering practices, including experimentation pipelines, model training workflows, evaluation benchmarks, and deployment standards.
• Ensure production excellence by maintaining monitoring systems, establishing metrics, and driving continuous improvements to model quality and user experience.
• Promote innovation by encouraging the team to explore new research ideas, technologies, and optimizations relevant to speech, audio, and language models.
• Foster an inclusive, high-performing team culture rooted in collaboration, ownership, and technical excellence.

:check: You have...

• Master's degree or higher in AI, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a closely related field.
• 5 years of hands-on experience building ML systems, including experience with speech technologies (ASR/STT, TTS) or NLP/LLM models.
• 3 years of experience managing engineering or research teams, including hiring, mentorship, and performance management.
• Solid understanding of ML system design, distributed training, inference optimization, and real-time model serving.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills; ability to work effectively across engineering, research, and product teams.
• Demonstrated ability to drive complex technical projects and deliver high-quality results in fast-paced environments.

:star: Exceptional candidates will have...

• Experience building end-to-end speech pipelines, such as automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, voice activity detection, or audio enhancement.
• Experience training or fine-tuning small or efficient LLMs for real-time applications.
• Background in deep learning research, including publications or participation in open-source projects.
• Familiarity with MLOps tools, model monitoring systems, and large-scale data pipelines.
• Prior experience growing teams or operating in a fast-scaling environment.