Performance Marketing Lead

Title: Performance Marketing Lead Location: New York, NY

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.

Read our blog to learn more.

About the role...

We’re looking for a Performance Marketing Lead to own paid user growth at Duolingo. You’ll help lead the strategy and team that bring new learners to Duolingo across 100+ markets and multiple products, including language, chess, and math. You’ll be accountable for growing high quality new users efficiently and proving the impact of that spend. You’ll partner with the Performance Marketing leadership team to shape where we invest next.

🧠  You will...

• Own Duolingo’s paid user growth goals, setting the strategy for acquiring new users who stay and learn.
• Lead and develop a team of performance marketers, setting a high bar for craft, rigor, and ownership.
• Run user acquisition across platforms such as Google UAC, Meta, TikTok, AppLovin, and programmatic partners, plus channels in China. You’ll decide where to scale, hold, or pull back as efficiency changes.
• Measure what user growth spend actually drives, using incrementality testing, saturation analysis, and new user quality metrics such as retention.
• Build creative testing at scale with agency, creator, UGC, and in house partners, and use results to shape what gets made next.
• Manage and hold agency and ad tech partners accountable for goals, pacing, and quality of execution.
• Flex spend with the organic calendar, partnering with Social, Brand, and Country Marketing around product launches, seasonal swings, and viral moments.
• Partner with Product and Engineering on measurement infrastructure, onboarding for paid users, and tests that connect acquisition to retention.
• Turn performance into clear recommendations for marketing leadership, including what isn’t working.

✅  You have...

• 8+ years of experience in performance marketing or paid user acquisition, with a focus on large scale, global mobile acquisition campaigns.
• 3+ years leading teams of performance marketers.
• A track record of owning a large, multichannel performance budget and taking channels from test to scale.
• Hands on experience with incrementality tests, saturation analysis, and LTV and ROAS models.
• Deep knowledge of the mobile user acquisition ecosystem, including attribution technologies and iOS privacy frameworks such as SKAN.
• Experience partnering with Product and Engineering teams on performance marketing.
• The judgment to recommend cutting or reallocating spend when returns don’t support it.
• Clear, concise written communication, from channel detail to leadership level recommendations.

⭐  Exceptional candidates will have...

• Experience leading user acquisition for a top subscription based mobile app or a high engagement consumer app with millions of daily users.
• Experience running acquisition in China or other markets with distinct ad ecosystems.
• Experience growing users across multiple products or apps.
• Experience scaling creative through UGC agencies, creator marketplaces, or creator networks.
• A passion for Duolingo’s mission to make education universally accessible.