Duolingo Staff Security Engineer at Duolingo responsible for shaping and delivering the company's security strategy. Leads complex security initiatives and builds scalable security services across applications and cloud infrastructure.
Responsibilities
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!
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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.
Qualification
A track record of leading large
Required
A track record of leading large, complex security engineering initiatives across multiple teams from proposal through production
