Doordash has hired Duolingo's famed social media manager

American delivery operator DoorDash has hired Zaria Parvez as its new director of social media, effective August 18. She announced the move on LinkedIn a week later and called it the start of “something bigger: empowering the next era and generation of content creators.”

Parvez is best known for transforming Duolingo into a social-first brand during her five years at the language-learning app. She joined Duolingo in 2020, fresh out of university and had no clue just how far her impact would reach, or that her role in the development of the brand’s beloved Duo character would become a model for how to lead a social-first brand strategy.

Duolingo’s TikTok went from a modest 35,000 followers when she began to a whopping 16.7 million today. She has been the mind behind a string of viral campaigns that turned the brand’s chaotic green mascot into a cultural fixture, including the 'death-of-Duo' campaign, which alone generated 1.7 billion impressions. Duo even officiated weddings in 2023 and tied the knot with Luckin Coffee's Lucky the Deer, and made appearances from Charli XCX’s Brat tour to the Love Island USA villa, skyrocketing waves of organic growth.

2021 file photo of Zaria Parvez, the architect of Duolingo’s trailblazing social strategy

Reflecting on her tenure, Parvez wrote on LinkedIn: “After five unforgettable years, 8 billion impressions and even more jaw-drops - it's time to take off the suit. Fresh out of college in 2020, I led Duolingo’s evolution into a social-first brand, turning organic social into a growth engine that drove waves of new users. Duolingo's social helped catapult the company’s market cap to nearly 7× in just five years by breaking into culture as an unexpected disruptor.”

At DoorDash, which has been expanding its footprint across APAC in markets such as Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, Parvez said she plans to pivot from building campaigns from scratch to focusing on leadership. “I’ve always been a builder who loves starting from scratch, but this next chapter is about something bigger… I’m excited to focus on flexing my leadership muscles and to challenge myself in ways I’ve never done before.”

She will be based in Pennsylvania, United States as per her LinkedIn.