Sean Scott

Senior Engineering Manager at Duolingo

New York, New York, United States

About

I am a full-stack software engineer with three years of experience, and a focus on the backend/API. The majority of my experience has been in Python and JavaScript, but I have always quickly picked up new technologies for my roles. Along those lines, I am very flexible and have jumped into frontend, infrastructure, and data (pipeline) roles when needed. I have some experience acting as tech lead for small teams and thoroughly enjoy designing, proposing, and discussion technical architecture. My biggest achievements include architecting and delivering a pharmacy authorization system with no downtime (at Blink Health), as well as simplifying and stabilizing the gameplay logic at HQ Trivia, completely eliminating the 10% incidence of post-question delay. I have also found and fixed many hard to track bugs as well as security vulnerabilities alongside my main responsibilities.

Experience

  • Duolingo (New York City Metropolitan Area)
    • Senior Engineering Manager
      Oct 2024 - Present · 1 yr 10 mos

      Led team focused on Video Call AI chatbot backend. High throughput: product was part of top 30 OpenAI customers in the world by token usage. Implemented flexible APIs and audio streaming, and migrated to newer LLMs. Developed LLM-based evaluation and monitoring systems for quality.

    • Staff Software Engineer / Team Lead
      Jan 2022 - Oct 2024 · 2 yrs 10 mos

      Managed up to 8 engineers concurrently. Led core product infrastructure teams to develop high uptime services. Found and executed large cost savings. Increased developer velocity by cutting tech debt and sharing best practices.

    • Tech Lead / Senior Software Engineer
      Sep 2021 - Jan 2022 · 5 mos

      Became tech and team lead for all core company monetization backends.

  • Cabin Crew at Emirates
    Oct 2018 - Nov 2019 · 1 yr 2 mos

    Took a break from software to work on board the biggest planes in the world!

  • Software Engineer at HQ Trivia
    May 2018 - Oct 2018 · 6 mos

    Stabilized core gameplay logic. Architected and implemented new user-facing and backend features. Productionalized and automated shows, and added monitoring and alerting.

  • Blink Health (New York City Metropolitan Area)
    • Senior Software Engineer
      Mar 2018 - May 2018 · 3 mos

      Implemented new pharmacy authorization system and replaced existing one with no downtime

    • Tech Lead
      Oct 2017 - Mar 2018 · 6 mos

      Coordinated with Customer Experience and Business Development teams to create robust, automated pharmacy transfer product.

    • Software Engineer
      Oct 2016 - Oct 2017 · 1 yr 1 mo

      Took full technical ownership of SMS system; responsible for 20% of daily order volume. Architected and implemented auto-payment system for customers taking maintenance medications. Refactored coupon selection algorithm for 100x improvement in speed.

  • Software Engineering Intern at Google
    Jun 2014 - Sep 2014 · 4 mos

    Improved the error flow of a backend sales tool. Had full ownership of project, including writing design documents, debating tradeoffs and approaches, and implementing exponentially-delayed retries for large data fetches.