Staff Security Engineer

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 finding innovative solutions to complex technical problems, running countless experiments (300+ at a time!) with our massive user base to make data-driven decisions, and educating our users and employees alike. You’ll have limitless learning opportunities, mentorship and collaboration with world-class minds, and a variety of projects with large scopes — while doing work that’s both fun and meaningful. Join our life-changing mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world.

About the role

As a Staff Security Engineer, you will shape and deliver Duolingo’s security strategy, safeguarding our learners, employees, systems, and services. You’ll identify the highest-impact security problems, lead complex initiatives from proposal through production, and build durable security capabilities across our applications and cloud infrastructure. Working across Engineering, Product, Legal, Finance, and IT, you’ll make practical risk decisions, establish secure-by-default patterns, and help teams ship safely at scale. This role is based in New York City. We know great candidates bring different combinations of experience. If you meet some or most of the qualifications below, we encourage you to apply!

🧠 You will...

• Set technical direction for security across Duolingo’s applications, cloud infrastructure, and engineering systems.
• Lead complex, multi-team security initiatives from problem definition and design through implementation, measurement, and ongoing ownership.
• Design and build scalable security services, controls, and automation that prevent, detect, and remediate risks with minimal manual effort.
• Partner with engineering teams to threat model systems, review architecture and code, prioritize risks, and deliver practical mitigations.
• Strengthen security across the software-development lifecycle, including secrets management, dependency security, vulnerability management, and CI/CD controls.
• Evaluate Duolingo’s security posture, use evidence to identify the highest-impact investments, and define measurable outcomes for security programs.
• Lead technical response to significant security incidents and translate lessons learned into lasting improvements.
• Establish reusable secure-by-default patterns for cloud and application infrastructure, including infrastructure as code.
• Communicate technical risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to engineering teams and company leaders.
• Mentor engineers, scale security knowledge through documentation and guidance, and raise the technical bar across Engineering.

✅ You have...

• A track record of leading large, complex security engineering initiatives across multiple teams from proposal through production.
• Deep experience in at least two of the following areas: application security, product security, cloud security, infrastructure security, detection and response, or security automation.
• Strong software-engineering skills in one or more programming or scripting languages and experience building reliable production systems or internal platforms.
• Experience securing cloud environments and designing controls for identity, networking, data protection, secrets, logging, and workload security.
• Experience applying threat modeling, architecture review, code review, and vulnerability analysis to real-world systems.
• Experience using infrastructure as code and CI/CD to deliver repeatable, testable, and secure configurations.
• Sound judgment in balancing security risk, engineering effort, product needs, and business priorities.
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to influence stakeholders with different technical backgrounds.
• The ability to work from or relocate to New York City.

⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...

• Experience building a security program or technical capability from an early stage and scaling it across an engineering organization.
• Experience securing large, multi-account or multi-cloud environments, particularly AWS and GCP.
• Experience creating security platforms or paved-road patterns adopted broadly by engineers.
• Experience leading high-severity incident response and driving durable improvements afterward.
• Experience applying AI-assisted tooling to security analysis, remediation, or control validation.

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: $204,000 — $306,000 USD

Benefits: Take a peek at how we care for our employees' holistic well-being with our benefits here.