How OnHires Helped Duolingo Strengthen Its Mobile Engineering Team

Education technology companies rely on strong engineering teams to keep digital learning experiences fast, reliable, and engaging for users worldwide.

As Duolingo continued expanding its product and user experience, it needed to strengthen its engineering team with talent capable of supporting both general software development and iOS-focused product delivery. Because mobile experience plays a central role in how users engage with the platform, the company needed a structured hiring process that could identify the right engineering candidates quickly while maintaining a high technical bar.

Hiring for engineering roles in consumer edtech requires more than strong coding skills. Companies need candidates who can work on product-focused systems, collaborate across teams, and contribute to user experiences at scale.

Duolingo needed to hire for software engineering roles that would directly support product development and mobile performance. The iOS-focused position required strong knowledge of mobile engineering and user experience delivery, while the broader software engineering role required solid technical fundamentals and the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced product environment.

Because experienced engineers in consumer technology remain highly competitive, the company needed a recruitment process that could move efficiently while keeping technical evaluation structured and role-specific.

OnHires implemented a recruitment strategy tailored to Duolingo’s education technology environment and engineering hiring needs.

We began with role calibration sessions to define the responsibilities, technical expectations, and success criteria for each position. For the software engineering role, the focus was on technical fundamentals, product development capability, and collaboration within a fast-moving engineering team. For the iOS-focused role, evaluation centered on mobile development expertise, application performance, code quality, and the ability to contribute to a polished user experience.

We then launched targeted sourcing pipelines across software engineering and mobile development talent pools. Structured interview workflows and calibrated scorecards helped standardize candidate evaluation, while weekly hiring operations improved stakeholder alignment, accelerated feedback, and reduced delays throughout the process.

OnHires managed the recruitment process end to end, from sourcing and screening to offer coordination and onboarding support.

The structured recruitment process helped Duolingo strengthen its engineering capabilities while maintaining speed and candidate quality.

By aligning recruitment with the specific technical needs of each role, the company was able to hire engineering talent that could contribute directly to product quality and mobile experience. This reduced hiring friction, improved candidate fit, and supported more efficient scaling of the engineering function.

The result was a more reliable hiring workflow and stronger support for continued product development in a highly competitive edtech environment.

Roles successfully filled:

This case demonstrates how structured recruitment can help education technology companies hire engineering talent more effectively.

By aligning hiring with technical requirements, product priorities, and user experience goals, Duolingo was able to strengthen its engineering team and improve hiring efficiency for critical software development roles.