Duolingo · 18 hours ago
Staff Data Scientist, Financial Forecasting
New York, NY
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$200K/yr - $300K/yr
6+ years expDuolingo is on a mission to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. They are seeking a Staff Data Scientist to lead and evolve their financial forecasting systems, working closely with various teams to produce accurate and explainable forecasts that support business strategy.
E-LearningEducationLanguage LearningMobile Apps
Responsibilities
Lead the financial forecasting system. Drive methodology, implementation, maintenance, and delivery as the technical owner of our revenue forecasting stack, in close partnership with the finance team. Publish forecasts that serve as the source of truth for company-wide planning and investor-facing decisions
Model subscription + experimentation dynamics. Develop modeling architectures that account for experimental lift, cohort behavior, seasonality, and more, making it clear what’s real impact and what’s noise across the hundreds of experiments Duolingo runs each quarter
Investigate deviations and lead with insight. When forecasts miss, lead the root-cause analysis by quantifying drivers of over- or under-performance (e.g. product changes, user behavior shifts, macro trends), collaborating across functions, and clearly communicating what happened and why to senior leadership. Build and be responsible for the statistics, tools, and dashboards that scale these insights across the company
Advance the technical frontier. Push our evolution beyond traditional time-series extrapolation and toward more sophisticated approaches such as cohort-based forecasting, retention chaining, and/or causal impact modeling, grounded in business realism and model interpretability
Mentor and influence. Serve as a technical mentor to data scientists across the organization, set a high standard for modeling, communication, and statistical rigor, and develop roadmaps for forecasting infrastructure and innovation
Qualification
Required
6+ years of proven experience building production-grade forecasting systems, with deep applied knowledge of subscription models and understanding of churn dynamics, cohort behaviors, and retention curves
Advanced degree (Masters or PhD) in Data Science, Economics, Statistics, or a related quantitative field with experience assessing and applying theoretical approaches in real-world situations (ex. when to use Bayesian structural models, when causal inference is vital, when a robust heuristic is better than over-fitting noise, etc.)
Experience distilling uncertainty, nuance, and model tradeoffs into streamlined, actionable narratives for finance and senior leadership partners
Track record of collaboration across technical and non-technical teams, with a consistent record of integrating feedback, aligning across functions, and operating with a strong sense of ownership and service
Strong judgment when balancing model complexity, interpretability, and speed of development, sometimes sacrificing exactness for interpretability
Expertise writing clean, well-documented code in Python and SQL, and building reliable, multipurpose production pipelines
Past work in organizations where A/B testing is constant, complicating training data and historical baselines
Company
Duolingo
Duolingo is a language-learning education platform that offers 98 total courses across nearly 40 distinct languages.
501-1000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Duolingo has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (41)
2024 (46)
2023 (36)
2022 (19)
2021 (14)
2020 (17)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$183.3MKey Investors
General AtlanticCapitalGDrive Capital
2021-07-28IPO
2020-11-18Series H· $35M
2020-04-14Series G· $10M
Leadership Team
Luis von Ahn
CEO, co-Founder & Board Member
Severin Hacker
CTO & Cofounder
Recent News
2026-01-22
2026-01-19
The Motley Fool
2026-01-16
Company data provided by crunchbase