Meet the real Zaria Parvez: The social media manager who became the brand

Strangers know Parvez (it feels strange to refer to her by surname, as our style guide dictates, when to so many she is simply Zaria), because she’s been the public face of Duolingo’s remarkable social media transformation, a journey she’s shrewdly documented on her personal platforms. In her five years with the language learning app, she grew its TikTok following from around 50,000 to over 16m followers and amassed over 8bn impressions across its socials. And then, of course, there was Parvez’s crowning glory: painstakingly building beloved mascot Duo the Owl only to take the shocking decision to kill it in one of the most talked-about marketing moments of 2025. Duolingo was suddenly on the lips of Dua Lipa.

The Drum catches up with Parvez a few days after it was revealed that she has taken up a new role as director of social at DoorDash. For someone who seems to have an innate understanding of the algorithm, she admits that even she was surprised by the response to her job news. “I think a lot of people cared because it was one of the first times that a social media manager had an impact on the brand but also was able to talk about it and bring everyone on the journey,” she says. “So I almost feel like it built this parasocial relationship, of like, ‘we know Zaria from Duolingo, and this is everything she’s done,’ and then I kind of just tore off the band aid.”

Parvez became synonymous with Duolingo not only because of her willingness to don a “crusty old owl suit,” but because the brand’s voice on social was pretty much inseparable from her own. “Twitter was really big for us when I first started, so I was like, I can’t really mess around here because everyone’s watching, but TikTok, we didn’t really have as many followers. The C-suite was not interested. And I was like, what if I just commented? It could be this witty response that’s just crazy to see coming from a brand account.” Comment she did, and Parvez’s self-admittedly ‘sarcastic’ style ultimately became the distinctive voice of the brand.

Parvez’s naturally quick-witted tone on Duolingo’s accounts wasn’t an accident. Long before Duo the Owl became ‘unhinged,’ she had trained as a journalist at the University of Oregon, convinced she might one day be an investigative reporter. While a snarky owl seems a long way from hard news, Parvez says that grounding in storytelling shaped the way she approached social media.

“The secret sauce superpower skill for social talent is, who’s a good writer? Being a writer really helps you articulate points quickly, and it helps you understand how to be witty and clever. [Knowing] what makes a good story, and how you show the whole ‘hero’s journey’ in one post, for example, has been so crucial.”

That storytelling nous also made Parvez unusually comfortable being visible in her own right. While most social media managers stay behind the curtain, she used her LinkedIn newsletter, ‘Make it Go Viral,’ to chronicle the ups and downs of her work – from algorithm struggles to campaign wins. That transparency helped her cultivate a following of her own, blurring the line between her role and her identity.

But as Parvez has already shared in her natural spirit of candor, that blurring of work life into home life has not always been as good for her well-being as it has been for her career. Last year, she took medical leave after reaching a point where she said she had felt “confused and exhausted” from the anxiety of managing Duolingo’s enormous accounts. “I think I used to really value my worth as a creative based off of how viral a video would go,” she confides to The Drum today. “I still feel it every now and then. I would be lying to say it’s completely eradicated. I’m fine now, but I’ve been really trying to find other metrics of success for myself.”

The “dopamine hit” of a viral smash will never go away, Parvez admits, but the change of surroundings has helped develop a sense of perspective that virality is not the only measure of success. “At DoorDash, it’s been really cool to be like, OK, yes, virality, but also, we barely have 200,000 followers on TikTok. We’re just starting to make organic content. We don’t have that first player advantage right now, but what are things that we can do that’ll still get people conversing and talking that don’t necessarily link just to a viral video?”

Many social media managers will be familiar with the feeling of burnout. They are, after all, often in the paradoxical position of being some of the most junior and under-resourced people in their companies and yet having within their gift immense power to shape public perception. As Parvez put it in her recent Link in Bio podcast interview: “[At Duolingo] I was junior enough that a lot of people struggled to see me as a leader yet innovative enough that people depended heavily on my work.”

This feeling of being on the front line inevitably makes it difficult for social media professionals to switch off, as Parvez herself has experienced. “Inherently, it always will be challenging, because so much of our job is being ‘always on’, and by being always on, you can get those bigger wins.” Now, though, she feels like she can think about career progression in a different way. “I ‘grind-ed’ because I wanted to grow really fast, and it was working. Now I’m at a point where I obviously care about my growth and how I can build this brand up, but there’s also other people around me. There’s different ways to do well at this org and accept that.”

The opportunity to develop as a leader was one of the big attractions of the move to DoorDash, where Parvez will head up a team of eight content creators. “I’m at a different stage in my career where I’ve done the grind, I’ve gone through the process. Now I understand what the social media managers after me will need to stay sane, need from their role manager, need from a leader.”

Having Gen Z leaders “who have gone through the social-first ringer” is critical to developing and supporting the next generation of talent, Parvez believes. “I’m realizing, [for] a lot of social managers now, a lot of their bosses actually don’t understand what they’re doing, but it’s working, so they keep going for it. I think that having that total lack of awareness has really hurt people.”

Parvez says she will always encourage her direct reports to use their personal brands, just as she has. “I know how cool it is when someone asks me about my work, to go stand on a stage and present about it. But why are we only restricting that to executives and leaders? I don’t think they understand the heart and soul that goes into creating content and social creative work. I also think there’s a little bit of a responsibility from our industry to be questioning more. Why are there only CMOs presenting right now? Do we really think these are the people creating the work?”

If encouraging young talent is one way of opening doors, Parvez has also found another: by stepping fully, and visibly, into her own identity. For all the professional milestones of the past five years, one of the most personal moments came in June when she chose to begin wearing hijab full-time. It was a decision that, like much of her journey, she chose to share in her newsletter. “A lot of people were like, ‘Whoa, we did not think the Duolingo owl was a Muslim hijabi girl,’” she recalls.

The choice, she says, was motivated by her lifelong commitment to her faith, of course, but also the absence she noticed in the rooms she suddenly had access to thanks to her success at Duolingo. “I didn’t see anyone that looked like me. It made me realize that hijabi Muslim women just don’t really exist in marketing to the extent that I wish they did on these stages. So it kind of just became, if you can’t see it, be it.”

Now, at DoorDash, Parvez has the rare chance to build something again, almost from scratch, but in an organization that is already comfortable with making significant marketing investments. “I told my manager when I was about to sign, ‘I will not sign this offer unless I have full creative freedom’. And that was also a big reason why I chose DoorDash, because there was creative freedom and a ramp to fly. They showed me examples of where they failed as a brand and how they recuperated and how no one got fired. We level-set before I joined: you know who you’re hiring, you’ve seen Duolingo chaos. Are you OK with that?”

Whatever she does next, comparisons will inevitably be drawn with her work at Duolingo. “I don’t know if I’ll ever replicate exactly what I did at Duolingo,” Parvez says. “Sometimes I call that just catching lightning in a bottle, but I feel like now it’s an opportunity to grow as a leader and build out this content house and see what it looks like when social is fully staffed.”

And when even a job post attracts so much attention, how does she deal with the weight of expectation that will be attached to her work? “I think it’s unfair of me to say, ‘don’t look at anything.’ I’m in a space where very few people are lucky to even have the success that I did at Duolingo. And if that is the only thing I become known for, I’m so grateful. Another viral campaign might not grow me as much as the interpersonal relationships and dynamics I learn as a leader. So yeah,” she smiles, “if Duolingo is all I’ve got, then I’m also very happy.”