Senior Learning Designer, Indian Languages
Duolingo · Pittsburgh, United States · 1mo ago
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.
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About the role...
We are looking for a senior language educator and curriculum designer with linguistics training, deep expertise in Hindi, and strong knowledge of cultural and linguistic diversity in India and the whole South Asian region. You will help shape Duolingo’s learning experiences for Indian languages by using your pedagogical expertise, cultural insight, and human-in-the-loop AI workflows. You’ll collaborate closely with product, engineering, and design partners to ship delightful, mobile-first learning that reflects the linguistic and cultural richness of Indian languages and advances Duolingo’s mission at scale. This role will help shape strategy and execution for new and existing Indian language courses.
This role must be based in Pittsburgh, PA. No accommodations for remote or other locations will be provided.
🧠 You will...
- Lead curriculum and learning design for one or more South Asian languages (starting with Hindi), balancing delight, cultural relevance, and measurable learning impact.
- Leverage human-in-the-loop AI workflows and prompt engineering to generate and refine high-quality content efficiently while maintaining Duolingo’s quality bar.
- Establish and maintain content quality systems (guidelines, rubrics, review workflows) to ensure linguistic accuracy, difficulty calibration, consistency, and brand voice across features and languages.
- Partner cross-functionally with Product, Design, Engineering, and Scaling Operations to plan roadmaps, ship experiments, and build scalable content generation processes.
- Contribute to strategy for teaching Hindi and other South Asian languages, informed by an understanding of the wider regional linguistic and cultural context.
- Help identify, recruit, onboard, and manage freelance educators, linguists, cultural consultants, and language reviewers representing relevant regions and communities.
✅ You have...
- Hindi teaching curriculum expertise. You have deep proficiency in Hindi and substantial experience teaching it as an additional language. You understand its grammar, pronunciation, writing system, registers, variation, and common learner challenges. You have experience designing Hindi curricula.
- India-centered cultural and regional expertise. Your cultural expertise is deepest in India, and you understand the broader South Asian sociolinguistic and sociopolitical context. You can navigate questions of language and identity, script, register, standardization, multilingualism, regional variation, and cross-border language communities with nuance.
- Knowledge and curiosity about India’s broader linguistic landscape. You are familiar with Hindi’s place within the Indo-Aryan language family, including its relationship with Urdu and points of comparison with languages such as Punjabi and Bengali. You’re eager and able to deepen your knowledge of other Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages quickly, and to collaborate effectively with language experts when working beyond your direct expertise.
- Linguistics training and typological awareness. You have a background in linguistics, including language typology, and can apply it to unfamiliar languages – working effectively with language experts to identify learning challenges and design accurate, pedagogically sound courses.
- Analytical thinking. You can evaluate linguistic questions systematically, distinguish errors from acceptable variation, and make clear decisions when conventions differ. You’re curious about AI-enabled, human-in-the-loop systems and excited to learn how to use them to support quality at scale.
- Creativity and product sense. You can transform serious learning objectives into experiences that feel approachable, playful, culturally meaningful, and motivating.
- Operational strength. You can lead complex projects, manage dependencies, maintain rigorous documentation, and improve processes without sacrificing quality.
- Excellent communication and collaboration. You communicate complex linguistic and pedagogical concepts clearly to both specialists and non-specialists. You give and receive feedback well and build productive relationships across disciplines.
- Relevant academic or equivalent professional preparation. You have a graduate degree (or equivalent practical experience) in Applied Linguistics, Language Education, Linguistics, Instructional Design, Learning Science, Indian or South Asian Languages, South Asian Studies, or a related field.
⭐ Exceptional candidates will have...
- Working familiarity with Dravidian languages (particularly Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada) and understanding of key typological and pedagogical differences between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families.
- Experience building human-in-the-loop generative-AI workflows for multilingual educational content.
- Experience designing consumer-facing mobile or app-based language-learning products.
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!
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