Platform Engineer II

Duolingo Duolingo · Consumer · Pittsburgh, PA · Engineering

Platform Engineer II role focused on building and operating the core compute platform powering Duolingo's applications, including Kubernetes infrastructure, GitOps, deployment patterns, SLOs, and self-service tooling. The role aims to improve reliability, safety, and speed of service delivery for product engineers.

What you'd actually do

  1. Build and operate core compute primitives that power production workloads based on Kubernetes, across different regions and cloud providers.
  2. Improve the delivery pipeline from commit to production by evolving our GitOps and deployment patterns, making rollouts safer and faster.
  3. Raise the operational bar: define SLOs, build dashboards/alerts, write runbooks, and participate in on-call/incident response to keep the platform dependable.
  4. Enable effective self-service by turning platform capabilities into reusable abstractions.

Skills

Required

  • Strong problem-solving skills
  • experience delivering and shipping pragmatic solutions in production environments
  • Experience with distributed systems fundamentals (networking, service-to-service communication, failure modes, caching/storage concepts)
  • Experience working on production systems
  • Experience with one or more CI/CD tools (Jenkins, Argo CD, GitHub Actions)
  • infrastructure management tools (Terraform, CloudFormation)
  • Clear written and verbal communication skills
  • Functional knowledge of Linux system administration and automation

Nice to have

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
  • Experience managing a production infrastructure on AWS, Google Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, or Azure
  • Exposure to multi-cluster or multi-region architectures
  • Experience with service mesh / zero-trust networking patterns (e.g., Istio mTLS, traffic management, authorization policies)