Engineering Manager, Notifications

Duolingo Duolingo · Consumer · New York, NY +1 · Engineering

Engineering Manager for Duolingo's Notifications team, focusing on improving learner engagement and habit formation through the notifications pipeline. This role involves technical leadership, people management, product strategy, driving execution of projects, and using data for A/B testing and product improvements. The team aims to ship impactful work that moves company metrics, with a focus on retention KPIs.

What you'd actually do

  1. Co-lead a cross-functional team with partners in product management, aligning on strategy, priorities, and success metrics for notifications and other out-of-app messaging.
  2. Drive execution of projects from spec to implementation, experimentation/analysis, and ongoing ownership, while ensuring system reliability, scalability, and observability.
  3. Use data and rapid experimentation to inform decisions; partner with internal stakeholders to design A/B tests and translate insights into product improvements that measurably impact retention KPIs.
  4. Attract, grow, and retain diverse engineering talent; provide clear expectations, coaching, and career development, and build a healthy, inclusive team culture.
  5. Set engineering quality standards and processes that balance speed and long-term maintainability; proactively manage tech debt, product quality, and and operational excellence.

Skills

Required

  • Experience leading, managing, and building a team of software engineers
  • demonstrated ability to hire, develop, and retain talent
  • shipping multi-engineer, multi-week+ projects with measurable business impact
  • balancing speed and quality
  • Strong product instincts
  • comfort in highly experimental, data‑driven environments
  • experience defining metrics and running A/B tests with analytics or data science partners
  • Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
  • clear written specs and status updates
  • Technical depth sufficient to guide architecture and implementation trade‑offs
  • evolve quality standards
  • mentor engineers on best practices

Nice to have

  • Experience leading teams focused on retention, engagement, growth, or habit‑formation features in consumer products
  • Experience setting team OKRs and operating cadences that consistently deliver outsized impact on company‑level metrics
  • Background managing teams with broad cross‑functional scope

What the JD emphasized

  • shipping multi-engineer, multi-week+ projects with measurable business impact
  • highly experimental, data‑driven environments
  • running A/B tests