Platform Engineer II
At a glance
Mid-level Platform & Infrastructure role at Duolingo. New York · $153,000–$207,000 base.
devopsroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build and run Kubernetes-based compute building blocks for production services across cloud providers and regions
- Refine GitOps and deployment workflows so teams can move code to production with safer, quicker rollouts
- Set reliability targets, create dashboards and alerts, and write runbooks for dependable platform operations
- Join incident response and on-call work to keep the compute platform running reliably
- Package platform features into reusable tools and abstractions that let product engineers serve themselves
What you bring
- Hands-on experience delivering and operating production systems, including through an industry role, internship, or substantial open-source work
- Working knowledge of distributed systems, including networking, service communication, failure handling, and caching or storage
- Experience with at least one named CI/CD tool and infrastructure management tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation
- Practical Linux administration and automation skills, plus clear communication for documentation and cross-team work
Who this fits
This mid-level role suits an engineer who wants to build and operate shared compute infrastructure while supporting product teams. You should be comfortable with production reliability work, including on-call and incident response.
From the employer
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 Platform Engineer on the Compute team, you’ll improve how engineers build and run services, helping ensure our compute platform is reliable at scale for our learners and fellow Duo engineers.
The Compute team builds and operates the core compute platform that powers our applications. We build paved roads (self-service platform primitives, templates, and tooling) and we operate them so product engineers can focus on shipping features with confidence.
🧠 You will...
- Build and operate core compute primitives that power production workloads based on Kubernetes, across different regions and cloud providers.
- Improve the delivery pipeline from commit to production by evolving our GitOps and deployment patterns, making rollouts safer and faster.
- Raise the operational bar: define SLOs, build dashboards/alerts, write runbooks, and participate in on-call/incident response to keep the platform dependable.
- Enable effective self-service by turning platform capabilities into reusable abstractions.
✅ You have...
- Strong problem-solving skills and 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 (through industry roles, internships, or substantial open-source work).
- Experience with one or more CI/CD tools (Jenkins, Argo CD, GitHub Actions) and infrastructure management tools (Terraform, CloudFormation)
- Clear written and verbal communication skills—comfortable writing docs/runbooks and collaborating across teams.
- Functional knowledge of Linux system administration and automation
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- A 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 and the operational patterns that make them reliable.
- Experience with service mesh / zero-trust networking patterns (e.g., Istio mTLS, traffic management, authorization policies).
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: $153,000—$207,000 USDBenefits: Take a peek at how we care for our employees' holistic well-being with our benefits here.
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Accommodations: 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@duolingo.com.
Equal Employment Opportunity: Duolingo is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.
Fraud Warning: Unfortunately, there is a rise in scammers pretending to be real Duolingo employees. Duolingo and our employees will never ask for your Social Security number, bank details, or passport info, and we’ll never ask you to deposit a check, purchase equipment, or exchange money during the interview process. Real Duolingo employees always use an email that ends in @duolingo.com or @recruiting.duolingo.com. Stay alert and double-check these details before sharing any information.
By applying for this position your data will be processed as per the Duolingo Applicant Privacy Notice.
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