Duolingo Software Engineer interview experience

After that, the rounds became more interview-like and interactive, with several conversations that built toward a pair programming segment.

The pair programming experience stood out because it wasn’t just a standalone problem—it involved debugging something in a codebase. It felt closer to day-to-day engineering, but it also meant there was less safety in relying on a single canned algorithm and more pressure to reason through how to fix an actual piece of existing logic. I didn’t end up with an offer, and what I took away was that the process rewarded comfort in a live debugging workflow,