Senior Manager, Scaling Operations

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 educating our users, experimenting with big ideas, making fact-based decisions, and finding innovative solutions to complex problems. You’ll have limitless learning opportunities and daily collaborations with world-class minds — while doing work that’s both meaningful and fun.

Join our life-changing mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world. 

Read our blog to learn more.

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About the role...

Scaling Operations is Duolingo’s 1-to-a-billion function. We turn promising ideas into reliable, scalable systems so teams can move faster without adding unnecessary complexity.

As a Senior Manager Scaling Operations, you’ll lead a small team and own operations for Duolingo’s contingent workforce and vendor procurement. You’ll define strategy, build the systems, and drive workforce planning in partnership with teams across Learning & Curriculum, Product, Engineering, Finance, and Legal. You’ll build centralized operations capability for contractor-heavy workflows across the company, improve the quality of AI-assisted work, automate staffing and assignment routing, and reduce manual effort for partner teams.

This role is based in Pittsburgh, PA or New York City, NY.

 

🧠  You will...

• Establish and implement a vision for freelance and vendor operations at the intersection of content systems and AI integration – defining success, setting roadmaps, and using AI and automation to deliver new learning content at scale while maintaining educational excellence;
• Design durable, tech-forward workflows that replace manual coordination with self-service tooling: centralized contractor management, self-serve task assignment, and structured QC and feedback loops.
• Identify the critical resources for scaling initiatives to succeed, both in terms of people and technology, and drive prioritization.

Manage a team of program managers.

 

✅  You have...

• People management experience. You have experience hiring and developing a team of program management staff.  
• Program management experience. You have demonstrated strong operational leadership, such as experience running programs of large scale and complexity or building and scaling processes from the ground up. 
• Collaboration skills. Partner with functions across the company—such as engineering, product management, content development, and executive leadership—to ensure alignment across teams and stakeholders.
• Tooling strategy experience. -savviness. You are curious about new technologies, and define the roadmap for you and your teams to increase efficiency with automation. You have strong, data-driven opinions about build vs buy tooling.

Strong communication skills. You have excellent verbal and written communication skills in English.

 

⭐  Exceptional candidates will have...

• Proven wins maturing a 0-to-1 operations function into a durable, instrumented system, including evaluation loops, anomaly detection, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Experience partnering deeply with engineering on internal tooling and operating systems; comfortable shaping roadmaps and trade-offs alongside a tech lead.