Staff Security Engineer
Duolingo · New York, NY
About this role
**Staff Security Engineer — Duolingo** Duolingo’s mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. As a **Staff Security Engineer**, you’ll shape and deliver Duolingo’s security strategy—safeguarding learners, employees, systems, and services. --- ## About the role You’ll identify the highest-impact security problems, lead complex initiatives from proposal through production, and build durable security capabilities across Duolingo’s applications and cloud infrastructure. You’ll work cross-functionally with **Engineering, Product, Legal, Finance, and IT** to make practical risk decisions, establish secure-by-default patterns, and help teams ship safely at scale. **Location:** New York City --- ## You will… - Set technical direction for security across Duolingo’s applications, cloud infrastructure, and engineering systems - Lead complex, multi-team security initiatives end-to-end (problem definition → design → implementation → measurement → ongoing ownership) - Design and build scalable security services, controls, and automation to 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 (secrets management, dependency security, vulnerability management, CI/CD controls) - Evaluate Duolingo’s security posture using evidence to identify the highest-impact investments and define measurable outcomes - 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 --- ## You have… - A track record of leading large, complex security engineering initiatives across multiple teams from proposal through production - Deep experience in at least two areas: application security, product security, cloud security, infrastructure security, detection & response, or security automation - Strong software engineering skills (programming/scripting) and experience building reliable production systems or internal platforms - Experience securing cloud environments and designing controls for identity, networking, data protection, secrets, logging, and workload security - Experience applying threat modeling, architecture review, code review, and vulnerability analysis to real-world systems - Experience using infrastructure as code and CI/CD to deliver repeatable, testable, and secure configurations - Sound judgment balancing security risk, engineering effort, product needs, and business priorities - Clear written and verbal communication skills; ability to influence stakeholders with different technical backgrounds - Ability to work from or relocate to New York City --- ## Exceptional candidates will have… - Experience building a security program or technical capability from an early stage and scaling it across an engineering organization - Experience securing large, multi-account or multi-cloud environments (especially **AWS** and **GCP**) - Experience creating security platforms or “paved road” patt
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