Senior Creative Technologist

Our mission at Duolingo is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. It’s a big mission, and even though we've made a lot of headway, we still have work to do — and that’s where you come in!

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

You’ll elevate the way we use art and animation to make our products more engaging, immersive, and interactive.

This role reports to the Director of Design Infrastructure and partners closely with our Product, Design, Animation, and Engineering teams. At Duolingo, we take pride in our craft and agonize over high-quality design with a user-friendly (and fun) experience for everyone.

  You will...

• Build interactive animations for our Math & Music courses using Rive, in ways that are repeatable & scalable
• Drive tooling improvements that more closely couple our design & animation tools, like Rive & Figma, with our engineering workflows.
• Work with technical animators, producers & engineers to drive efficiency across pipelines that help teams go from ideas to an interactive in-app experience. Things like: pitching and building automated solutions to digital asset management, as well as advising on the organizational structure, naming conventions, and technical/performance expectations for animation states.
• Stay on top of feature developments for our most critical tools, like Rive & Figma, and propose projects that can upgrade how we use these tools. Build plugins and write scripts that can make our tools work better for us.
• Test, learn, and promote new tools and technologies to further animation and interactivity in our products. Serve as a point of contact across the business for how we’re leveraging & improving our tooling stack.
• Partner closely with Design Ops, who will use your systems and tools to operationalize creative workflows that unlock high-quality execution. Drive the technical documentation for creative best practices to help teams adopt new tools & technologies.

  You have...

• Experience delivering delightful visuals while adhering to performance constraints, reducing technical complexity while still hitting MVP requirements
• Experience writing plugins, scripts, and tools
• Experience with interactive animation for mobile content
• A minimum of 5 years experience in a role similar to creative technology (technical or procedural animation, scripting gameplay, state machines, etc.)
• Experience succinctly communicating trade-offs, ideas, and recommendations to managers, engineers, and artists
• A portfolio that demonstrates your prototyping savvy
• A demo reel that is no more than 2 minutes long, including a breakdown calling out your work in the reel
• The ability to relocate to New York City or Pittsburgh, PA

  Exceptional candidates will have...

• Proficiency in Python, C++, or similar scripting languages
• Experience working at a small game studio, VFX house, or tech start-up
• Experience with Rive
• General 3D Skills like modeling, texturing, rigging, and animating
• An understanding of game design principles and player experience.
• Experience with Maya, Houdini, Toonboom Harmony, or similar tools