I applied online via the website from overseas. The next day, I was given a take-home programming task with one week to solve.

After that, I had a non-technical phone interview and was given an offer on the spot, contingent on background checking.

The take-home task was not particularly difficult. Although having an NLP background definitely helps, you don't actually need to know NLP in order to solve it.

The whole process was straightforward, not stressful, and surprisingly fast. It was not nearly as traumatic as many other processes, and the task was fun to solve and down-to-earth – an actual problem faced by Duolingo, not some random textbook exercise.

Why do you want to work at Duolingo?