Company details

Pittsburgh, PA

HEADCOUNT

500-999

ORG TYPE

Corporate

SECTOR

Retail & Consumer

WEBSITE

https://www.duolingo.com/

About the company

Duolingo builds consumer education products, best known for the Duolingo language-learning app. Duolingo also operates the Duolingo English Test and has expanded into subjects like math and music. The company sells a mix of subscriptions and advertising, with a mission-driven focus on making education accessible at scale. Duolingo is a public company headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Locations and presence

Duolingo is headquartered at 5900 Penn Ave in Pittsburgh and also operates a New York City office alongside smaller global offices. Duolingo runs a hybrid setup for many corporate roles, with Tuesdays to Thursdays as in-office days and flexibility on Mondays and Fridays.

Palpable Score

78.0

/ 100

Duolingo is a strong pick for early-career candidates who want real entry routes, because Duolingo runs two internship cohorts (including Thrive) and hires new grads across technical and product tracks. Duolingo stands out for hiring transparency, thanks to unusually detailed public guides to engineering and design interview stages, but candidate experience still varies by team and recruiter. Pay signals are competitive and often range-backed, while long-run progression evidence is less measurable because Duolingo does not publish early-career promotion or retention stats.

Pillar 1: Early-career access

Score

16.0

/ 20

The company runs two structured summer internship cohorts (Thrive plus a graduating internship) and publicises cohort hiring as an early-talent pipeline rather than one-off intern openings.

Duolingo posts recurring university and new graduate roles across engineering and adjacent tracks, supported by recruiter and company communications around annual cycles.

The company hires at a smaller scale than big tech incumbents, so early-career access is meaningful but not “high-volume” compared with large graduate factories.

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Pillar 2: Hiring fairness and transparency

Score

15.5

/ 20

The company publishes an engineering interview guide that names specific interview session types, tools used, time limits, and which sessions apply to university and new grad roles.

Duolingo publishes a role-specific interview breakdown for product design, including a hiring manager video interview and a virtual onsite with defined components.

The company still has mixed candidate reports on consistency and tone, including complaints about slow closure or unclear rejection rationale, which limits fairness even with strong upfront documentation.

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Pillar 3: Learning and support

Score

17.2

/ 20

The company pairs interns with an “intern host” who acts as mentor and manager, and the company runs pre-internship programming before Day 1 (community events, cohort channels, and onboarding touchpoints).

Duolingo describes interns working on team-owned projects that ship toward real goals, capped by end-of-summer showcases rather than shadowing-only placements.

The company positions Thrive as a skill-building internship track with defined role families (including software engineering and product management) and a consistent annual cadence.

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Pillar 4: Pay fairness and stability

Score

15.3

/ 20

The company shows clear intern pay signals in public postings and aggregated datasets, including a posted hourly range for software engineering internships and consistent high-end hourly benchmarks.

Duolingo appears to publish employer-provided pay ranges on many US job listings surfaced via major job boards, which helps early-career candidates compare offers before applying.

The company’s pay transparency is not fully uniform across every listing channel and geography, so some candidates still rely on third-party aggregation rather than first-party ranges.

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Pillar 5: Early-career outcomes

Score

14.0

/ 20

The company states that 85% of interns who received an offer chose to return, which is a concrete signal of intern satisfaction and offer competitiveness.

Duolingo has strong overall employee sentiment on major review platforms, with solid ratings for culture and work-life balance alongside “career opportunities” scoring that sits a bit lower than the overall average.

The company does not publish early-career outcome metrics like internship-to-full-time conversion rate, time-to-promotion ranges, or early-tenure retention by cohort, which limits confidence about typical progression after the first role.

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