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 Software Engineer I to join our China team. In this role, you’ll build and ship features that drive user growth and deliver high-quality learning experiences to millions of learners in China. You’ll work closely with product managers, designers to create engaging, localized experiences tailored to this market.

This is an opportunity to contribute to a fast-moving, high-impact team focused on one of Duolingo’s most important growth regions. You’ll gain experience working across the stack (backend and client), running experiments, and collaborating cross-functionally to improve key metrics like daily active users (DAU).

🧠  You will...

• Collaborate with product managers and designers to drive user growth in China.
• Work with Government Relations (GR) and cross-functional partners to ensure product compliance in China
• Lead individual project priorities, deadlines, and deliverables
• Contribute to code reviews and collaborate across teams to ensure quality and scalability

✅  You have...

• Graduated or will graduate with a B.S. or M.S. degree in Computer Science or related technical field (i.e. math, physics, or data science) before summer 2026
• 0–1 years of experience programming in one or more of: Java, Python, Kotlin, or Swift
• Dedication to our mission of universally available education
• Relocation to Beijing, China. This position is based in Beijing.

⭐  Exceptional candidates will have...

• A GPA of 3.6+
• A Duolingo streak
• Proficient in both spoken and written English.

Mission

Speechify is the easiest way to listen to the world’s information. Articles on the web, documents in the cloud, books on your phone. We absorb it all and let you listen to it at your desk, on the go, at your own speed, and with tools that make learning easier, deeper, and faster.

What streaming services have done for audio entertainment, we’re doing for audio information. And whatever we’re doing seems to be working. We’re #1 in our category, and experiencing exponential growth.

Overview

We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Core Experiences Team. This team builds and maintains the foundational services and SDKs that power Speechify’s product experience across platforms. It's a critical role for someone who enjoys working at the intersection of product and infrastructure, thinks strategically, and is passionate about designing clear, reliable APIs and simple systems that directly enhance the user experience.

What You’ll Do

• Collaborate with Speechify’s Product Teams to scope projects, find ways to reduce scope to get faster feedback from customers, navigate the integration/UX tradeoffs relevant to different product teams, and deliver solutions via our cross-platform SDK
• Optimize existing functionality to ship things like faster loading and more intelligent parsing by designing more efficient abstractions and improving our algorithms
• Ship cloud functions, lightweight backend services, and jobs using Kotlin

An Ideal Candidate Should Have

• Systems thinking. You know that optimizing a system requires end-to-end design, and you believe simplicity is valuable.
• Speed. You work quickly to generate ideas and options and know how to decide which things can ship now and what things need time
• Focus. We’re a high-growth startup with a busy, remote team. You know how and when to engage or be heads down
• Collaboration. You know how to inspire, play, and negotiate with opinionated designers, marketers, and PMs
• Preferred Tech Stack:
  • Kotlin Multiplatform (Java experience is OK but role is Kotlin Multiplatform) 
  • Prior experience with GCP is a plus

What We Offer

• A fast-growing environment where you can help shape the company and product.
• An entrepreneurial-minded team that supports risk, intuition, and hustle.
• A hands-off management approach so you can focus and do your best work.
• An opportunity to make a big impact in a transformative industry.
• Competitive salaries, a friendly and laid-back atmosphere, and a commitment to building a great asynchronous culture.
• Opportunity to work on a life-changing product that millions of people use.
• Build products that directly impact and support people with learning differences like dyslexia, ADD, low vision, concussions, autism, and more.
• Work in one of the fastest growing sectors of tech, the intersection of artificial intelligence and audio.

Think you’re a good fit for this job? 

Tell us more about yourself and why you're interested in the role when you apply.
And don’t forget to include links to your portfolio and LinkedIn.

Not looking but know someone who would make a great fit? 

Refer them! 

Speechify is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. 

Speechify does not discriminate on the basis of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or other legally protected status.

Company Overview

At Zuora, we do Modern Business. We’re helping people subscribe to new ways of doing business that are better for people, companies and ultimately the planet. It’s an approach resulting from the shift to the Subscription Economy that puts customers first by building recurring relationships instead of one-time product sales and focuses on sustainable growth. 

Through our leading expertise and multi-product suite - including Zuora Billing and Zuora Revenue — we provide a unified monetization and revenue automation platform that connects quoting, billing, payments, and revenue recognition end to end. Our solutions give finance and revenue teams a single source of truth for subscription economics, streamline ASC 606-compliant revenue recognition, and enable real-time insights into growth, profitability, and customer lifetime value.

We are transforming all industries and working with the world’s most innovative companies to monetize new business models, nurture subscriber relationships and optimize their digital experiences.

The Team & Role

The Beijing Billing Core team is a specialized engineering powerhouse and the heartbeat of Zuora’s global platform. As a mission-critical core team, we architect the foundational systems that power the world’s most sophisticated enterprise businesses. We operate at the intersection of high-scale distributed systems and real-time data innovation, prioritizing long-term engineering excellence and robust, scalable design.

The Opportunity: Leading the Strategic Evolution

We are currently driving a high-stakes evolution from traditional enterprise architecture to an intelligent, event-driven ecosystem.

• Mission-Critical Impact: Your work sits at the center of the global economy, directly enabling the growth of industry-leading organizations.
• The AI-Augmented Frontier: We are pioneering the future of software delivery by embracing an AI-first engineering culture. Our team leverages advanced AI development environments to navigate complex architectural puzzles, allowing our engineers to focus on high-level systems thinking and innovation.
• Global Technical Leadership: This is a rare opportunity to bridge the gap between stable, world-class foundations and greenfield data engineering within a high-talent global hub.

The Mission: Architecting the Future of Billing

Your mission is to ensure our platform remains the definitive global standard for reliability and intelligence. You will solve the industry’s most challenging scale and consistency problems, building a self-healing, high-concurrency engine that defines the future of digital commerce.

This is a location specific position that requires you to come into the office regularly to be most effective. 

What you’ll do

• Architect Mission-Critical Systems: You will design and evolve high-performance, distributed services within our core Java environment. You will be responsible for the architectural stewardship of systems that process billions of transactions, ensuring they remain scalable, robust, and enterprise-grade.
• Drive Real-Time Data Innovation: You will lead the development of sophisticated stream processing pipelines and event-driven architectures. By bridging the gap between foundational data stores and real-time analytics, you will enable the "Intelligence Layer" that defines the future of our global platform.
• Pioneer AI-Augmented Engineering: You will embrace an AI-first development culture, utilizing advanced tools like Claude Code and Codex to navigate complex logic and solve deep architectural puzzles. You will champion engineering excellence, prioritizing disciplined, maintainable design over temporary workarounds.

What You’ll Achieve: Impact & Outcomes

Instead of a list of tasks, these milestones focus on your growth and impact within the team.

• In your first 3 months: You will develop a thorough understanding of our core engine and streaming pipelines. You will successfully use AI-assisted tools to deliver high-quality features and enhancements within our distributed environment.
• By month 6: You will take ownership of a specific service or functional area. You will implement complex streaming or backend features, ensuring they are performant and integrate seamlessly with our real-time data layer.
• Within your first year: You will contribute to the long-term reliability of our platform by resolving technical bottlenecks. You will collaborate with the team to adopt AI-augmented practices and play a key role in the transition toward a more responsive, event-driven architecture

Your Experience (Must-Haves)

To ensure an inclusive applicant pool, we have limited this to core skills essential for success in this role.

• Strong Java Foundations: Significant experience building and scaling services within large codebases using Modern Java, the Spring Framework, and ORM/Persistence Frameworks; committed to delivering clean, maintainable, and disciplined code.
• Distributed Systems & Data Engineering: Expert in architecting stream processing pipelines and managing data consistency in high-concurrency, data-intensive systems; proficient in leveraging Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Beam, and Change Data Capture (CDC) alongside MySQL, ClickHouse, and Redis to build scalable architectures that support evolving schemas and massive data growth.
• Infrastructure & Deployment: Proven ability to architect and manage cloud-native backend services using AWS and Kubernetes to ensure high availability and system resilience.
• AI-Assisted Productivity: Proficient in utilizing AI-assisted development tools such as Claude, Codex, and Cursor to solve complex engineering puzzles efficiently and increase overall technical leverage.

Nice to Haves

These are not required for application but are areas where you can add immediate value.

• Data & Analytics: Experience with relational database optimization or building real-time data synchronization solutions.
• Cloud Operations: Familiarity with deploying and monitoring services in cloud-native or containerized environments.
• Collaborative Approach: Experience working in a global engineering hub and a desire to participate in technical discussions and learning.

#ZEOLife at Zuora

As an industry pioneer, our work is constantly evolving and challenging us in new ways that require us to think differently, iterate often and learn constantly—it’s exciting. Our people, whom we refer to as “ZEOs" are empowered to take on a mindset of ownership and make a bigger impact here. Our teams collaborate deeply, exchange different ideas openly and together we’re making what’s next possible for our customers, community and the world. 

As part of our commitment to building an inclusive, high-performance culture where ZEOs feel inspired, connected and valued, we support ZEOs with:

• Competitive compensation, variable bonus and performance reward opportunities, and retirement programs
• Medical, dental and vision insurance
• Generous, flexible time off 
• Paid holidays, “wellness” days and company wide end of year break
• More than 10 weeks  fully paid parental leave 
• Learning & Development stipend
• Opportunities to volunteer and give back, including charitable donation match
• Free resources and support for your mental wellbeing  

Specific benefits offerings may vary by country and can be viewed in more detail during your interview process.

Location & Work Arrangements

Organizations and teams at Zuora are empowered to design efficient and flexible ways of working, being intentional about scheduling, communication, and collaboration strategies that help us achieve our best results. In our dynamic, globally distributed company, this means balancing flexibility and responsibility — flexibility to live our lives to the fullest, and responsibility to each other, to our customers, and to our shareholders. For most roles, we offer the flexibility to work both remotely and at Zuora offices.

Our Commitment to an Inclusive Workplace

Think, be and do you! At Zuora, different perspectives, experiences and contributions matter. Everyone counts. Zuora is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to creating an inclusive environment for all.

Zuora does not discriminate on the basis of, and considers individuals seeking employment with Zuora without regards to, race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply. Applicants in need of special assistance or accommodation during the interview process or in accessing our website may contact us by sending an email to assistance(at)zuora.com.