Duolingo ‘s recruitment is really expanding like crazy! In addition to Software Engineer, New Grad has opened up the window for all 25/26 year olds to apply, and the AI Research Engineer position is also advancing rapidly. Last week, I just finished a complete process for my students, so I'll review it in detail here, and summarize some of the common test directions to give students who are ready to apply a little reference.
Overall process overview
This interview was divided into two parts: Zoom preliminary round + VO four rounds of formal interview. The overall pace was quite tight, but the questions were relatively standard, not too many tricky questions. The focus was on expressing ideas and interacting with the interviewers.
First round of Zoom interviews
This round was actually a casual conversation. The interviewer mainly introduced some current projects and research directions Duolingo is working on, such as personalized recommendation system in language learning, AI conversation practice, automatic scoring, etc., and then threw an open question:
"We have some ideas now but haven't done the groundwork yet, do you have any inspiration or ideas?"
There is no standard answer to this kind of question, it depends more on your innovative thinking and product sense. it is recommended to prepare a few thinking in combination with "AI + Education" in advance, for example:
- How to make AI models better understand learners' pronunciation, grammatical errors;
- How to dynamically adapt learning paths through reinforcement learning.
Round 2 Coding
Pure coding, a very simple encryption/decryption question with logic similar to Caesar Cipher.
As long as you can write clearly about character displacement and boundary processing, you can basically pass.
VO (Virtual Onsite) four-wheeled
Duolingo's onsite interview is quite unique, with four rounds of different points.
First round: Presentation
You are required to prepare a 30-minute project presentation on the most representative research or system you have done, and then allow 10-15 minutes for questions from the interviewer.
The focus is on:
- Clear logic(Motivation → Methods → Experiments → Conclusions)
- In-depth understanding of issues(Answer when asked for details)
The trainee did well in this round, the pace was steady throughout and the interviewer was quite friendly.
Round 2: Pair Coding
This round is a total giveaway. The question is a basic sorting logic that can be written in one line of Python code.
The whole round was 75 minutes and was done in 30 minutes, the interviewer just said "You nailed it" and then the two of them chatted for about ten minutes.
Round 3: ML Octavo
Pure machine learning fundamentals. All textbook level problems:
- Logistic Regression Principle
- Common Methods of Feature Processing
- Overfitting? How do you prevent it?
- AUC / ROC curve understanding
All the answers were correct and ended early. The interviewer even confirmed at the end that the answers were fine, it went very well.
Round 4: System Design
This round was quite interesting, titled "Design a system where you can watch small videos to learn a language".
The core test is in:
- System module division (content recommendation, video processing, speech recognition, interaction module)
- Model selection (e.g. fusion points for NLP + CV)
- Scalability and user feedback mechanisms
This round favors the combination of product design + technology, especially examining whether you can land the research thinking into product logic.
Summarize
Duolingo's AI Research Engineer interview process is a lot milder than expected, unlike big tech where algorithms are bombarded, but instead focuses more on research ability, product sense and clear communication.
If you want to get an offer, it is recommended to prepare in three ways:
- Coding Brush up on the basics(strings, arrays, sorting, HashMap operations);
- ML Basic eight-legged text is firmly established.;
- Presentation + System Design To practice expressing logic.
Programhelp help you succeed in the interview
This time, participants used Programhelp's remote assistance throughout the whole process, and received real-time voice prompts during the presentation and ML sessions to ensure a natural, unhurried pace of answering questions.
We also currently support Duolingo, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, Two Sigma, and various other big players for remote untraceable assists, VO assists, and proxy interviews.
If you want to lock in a new grad opportunity in advance and secure an interview for an AI/ML position, please send a private message to Programhelp.
We help you with the two major hurdles of technique and expression.
