Senior AI Engineering Manager

Senior Engineering Manager, Video Call Model Team

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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: $256,000 — $384,000 USD.

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.