Duolingo's designers care about creating high-quality experiences that look and feel fun. From animators to writers, product designers to researchers, Design brings purpose, feeling, and delight to every interaction with our brand, inside the app and out.

As a designer, you'll join a culture of creativity and craft, where we have a high bar for excellence and an endless curiosity about how to bring more unexpected quirk and fun to the pursuit of learning.

Join us in our mission to develop education for our half a billion (and growing!) learners around the world.

About the Role

Duolingo's Creative Technologists sit at the intersection of design, animation, and engineering,turning ambitious ideas into interactive, production-ready experiences that reach millions of learners. As a Creative Technology Manager, you'll both manage a team of Creative Technologists and directly elevate how we use art, motion, and interactivity to create delightful, performant, and scalable learning experiences.

You'll lead the prototyping of new ideas, build production-ready systems, and shape the tooling that enables teams to move faster. This role reports to the Senior Manager of Creative Technology and is based in Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY.

Responsibilities

• Act as the technical lead for cross-functional partners (product designers, product managers, and engineers) to unblock bold ideas and drive them from concept through delivery
• Develop your team's skills and careers, giving clear, actionable feedback and coaching toward greater scope and impact
• Create and evolve complex animated UI using Rive or similar technologies for high-visibility features across the app
• Collaborate directly with iOS and Android engineers to design asset functionality, troubleshoot, and optimize performance
• Shape our design and animation ecosystem (Rive, Figma, Unity, internal tools) by developing tools, automations, and systems that scale high-quality output

Requirements

• 5+ years in roles adjacent to creative technology (e.g., technical animation, gameplay scripting, CG supervision, pipeline/TD work) with proven people management or leadership experience
• A portfolio or demo reel that demonstrates:

+ High-quality visuals delivered within real-world performance constraints + Reducing complexity while achieving product goals + Systems thinking (e.g., reusable animation or interaction systems) + Tooling that meaningfully improves team workflows + Prototyping savvy and end-to-end problem solving + Strong programming or scripting skills (e.g., Python, C++, or similar)

• Excellent communication skills, including fluency in design-to-engineering handoffs, and communicating technical constraints to non-technical partners
• Experience operating in highly ambiguous environments and independently driving projects with cross-functional dependencies
• Ability to work from or relocate to Pittsburgh, PA or New York, NY

Nice to Have

• Experience creating interactive animation for mobile products at scale
• Proficiency with Rive for building UI and designing complex user interactions
• A strong motion and design sensibility across 3D or 2D animation pipelines (Maya, Blender, Houdini, or Toon Boom, etc.)
• Understanding of game design principles, especially for learning contexts
• A passion for the craft and a care for their people

Salary and Benefits

We post a multi-level salary range for all of our roles. This is not inclusive of the rest of our awesome portfolio that includes equity compensation and world-class benefits. Our salary ranges are the same for all US locations. Your recruiter can share more details about the range for a specific level during the hiring process.

The actual salary within the range is determined by many factors including but not limited to, skills, experience, education, and internal equity.

Salary Range: $182,800-$247,300 USD

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What you'll do

• Work side-by-side with engineers to develop new animation solutions across DCC and Machine Learning.
• Design and implement cutting edge animation tools/pipelines for animators and designers in the digital content creation space.

What you need

• Proven experience as a Technical Animation expert showcased with motion matching and procedural solutions in released products.
• Proven experience in building animation tools and scripts in released products.

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