Staff Data Scientist, New Subjects

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.

About the role

Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. We’re expanding beyond languages to bring joyful, effective learning in new domains – Math, Music, and Chess. These are early but strategically critical bets for Duolingo, and we need exceptional data science leadership to shape what success looks like.

We’re looking for a trailblazing, hands-on staff-level data scientist to define and build and expand data science in our New Subjects pillar. You will be a pivotal DS voice in this space: setting the vision, leading with metrics, and embedding experimentation into how we build. You will establish and manage a team of data scientists in the pillar, with a strong IC self-focus in the beginning. If you’re excited to influence the future of education and build from the ground up, this is your moment.

:brain: You will...

• Lead the end-to-end cycle of translating ideas into production-ready data solutions, ensuring they are measurable, robust, and built to last.


• Apply advanced methods (e.g. causal inference, structural modeling, machine learning) to deeply understand how learners engage with new subjects.


• Design and evaluate A/B tests, build metrics and attribution models, and help PMs, designers, and engineers make smarter product decisions.


• Collaborate with data engineering and BI to turn insights into durable data products: pipelines, dashboards, algorithms.


• Partner with product and learning leads to identify and prioritize the most impactful questions we can answer with data.


• Build and lead a small but mighty team as the New Subjects footprint grows.


• Evangelize protocols in scientific rigor and help level up data science across the org.

:check: You have...

• Advance degree or equivalent experience in Data Science, Economics, Statistics or a related quantitative field.


• 6+ years applying data science to real-world product problems, ideally in fast-paced environments.


• Expertise in at least one of: causal inference, behavioral modeling, experiment design, or applied ML.


• Fluency in Python and SQL, and comfort working across the stack (from raw data to dashboards).


• Exceptional clarity of thinking and communication: you make complex ideas simple and actionable.


• Experience as a tech lead or manager, with a proven ability to build and nurture talent.


• Comfortable working from our Pittsburgh HQ.

:star: Exceptional candidates will have...

• Experience in 0→2 environments: setting up metrics, pipelines, and tests from scratch.


• Familiarity with “big data” tooling (e.g. Redshift, BigQuery, Hive).


• A passion for learning, teaching, and making knowledge joyful.


• An alarming Duolingo streak or suspiciously high XP.