Senior Software Engineer, Backend

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.

Below you can find more information about the team we're hiring for:

Observability Team:

The Observability 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.

🧠 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

✅ You have...

A Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a 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

⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...

Industry experience building high-traffic APIs using public cloud providers

Experience with industry observability technology, such as OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, or DataDog.

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. We encourage you to talk with your recruiter for more information related to compensation for this role!

Salary Range:

$182,800—$247,300 USD

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

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.

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

Unfortunately, there is a rise in scammers pretending to be real Duolingo employees. Duolingo and our employees will never ask for your Social Security number, bank details, or passport info, and we’ll never ask you to deposit a check, purchase equipment, or exchange money during the interview process. Real Duolingo employees always use an email that ends in @duolingo.com or @recruiting.duolingo.com. Stay alert and double-check these details before sharing any information.

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