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. 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. The offered salary is dependent upon several factors, including work experience, skills, and internal peer comparisons. The posted range is subject to change in the future. For this role, base salary is supplemented by equity compensation. We encourage you to talk with your recruiter for more information related to compensation for this role! Salary Range: $163,200 — $244,800 USD Take a peek at how we care for our employees' holistic well-being with our benefits here . We will do everything we can within reason to make sure that your interview takes place in an environment that fairly and accurately assesses your skills. If you need assistance or accommodation, please contact accommodations@d...