Senior Data Scientist, Engagement

Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. But we’ve got more left to do — and that's where you come in!

Duolingo is the most popular language-learning application in the world, with over 500 million learners and over half a billion exercises completed daily. Beyond our core learning product, we have also entered into literacy with Duolingo ABC and English proficiency testing with the Duolingo English Test.

We are passionate about educating our users, making fact-based decisions, and finding innovative solutions to complex problems. We offer meaningful work, limitless learning opportunities, and collaboration with world-class minds. Come brighten your life and over half a billion more!

As a Data Scientist, you’ll generate insights that guide product development for 500 millions learners worldwide. Your role will focus on analyzing user retention and engagement in our flagship learning app, with a focus on Duolingo’s unique social and gamification features that make learning fun.

You will:

• Work closely with heads of product and engineering to lead data science efforts related to retention, engagement, social, and gamification features
• Leverage a wide range of analytical/statistical methodologies to enable product development decisions
• Collaborate with data scientists and product managers launching hundreds of experiments each quarter
• Continuously identify best-in-class methodologies and innovative solutions to improve and grow the data science practice at Duolingo
• Manage cross-functional relationships to prioritize and resource all data science projects touching the engagement area
• Own dashboards, reports, and codebase related to engagement and retention
• Ensure the integrity of our tracking and data

You have:

• 5+ years of data science experience, particularly with digital consumer products with millions of users
• BA/BS in a quantitative field (e.g.: statistics, economics, computer science) or commensurate work experience at a high-growth start-up or top technology company
• Expert-level skills in SQL, R/Python, and statistical methods to analyze and model behavioral data
• Strong relationship management and executive presentation skills
• Ability to extract insights from messy, ambiguous datasets to inform product development decisions
• Ability to translate complex models/analysis into insights that are accessible to non-technical stakeholders, and prioritize work based on highest business impact vs technical complexity

Exceptional candidates will have:

• MS or PhD degree in a quantitative field (e.g.: statistics, economics, computer science)
• Applied experience with “big data” technologies (e.g. BigQuery, Redshift, Hadoop), analysis of complex experiments, and statistical modeling using very large datasets (clustering, predictive modeling, etc).
• Experience with freemium business models, and/or products that achieve user growth through word of mouth
• Experience articulating business questions and using available data to find answers that translate into business recommendations
• Ability to thrive in a high-growth environment
• Demonstrated self-direction, with a desire both to learn new techniques and teach others
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced environment with imperfect datasets
• Programming experience in Java or Scala a plus

We aim to return to office, and as such are requiring all employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19.