From the listing
About the role
DuckDuckGo is the online protection company and remote-first team of 400+ on a mission to raise the standard of trust online. Founded in 2008 and profitable since 2014, millions use its browser, search engine, and DuckDuckGo subscription. It also offers private, useful, and optional AI, including Duck.ai.
As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Backend Functional Team, you'll lead complex projects across key company-wide objectives. The culture of trust, inclusivity, and empowered project management gives each team member full ownership of projects, from scoping and execution to postmortem.
What you'll do
- Lead complex projects across key company-wide objectives.
- Use Perl (Version 5), Go, and Node.js to write pragmatic, performant, testable code that works consistently.
- Collaborate remotely with peers and take responsibility for solving product issues impacting the all-in-one privacy solution, whether large or small.
- In time, formally mentor other engineers, supporting their career growth and the growth of the Backend Team.
What they're looking for
- 7+ years of professional experience, primarily focused on backend systems that power consumer-facing products.
- Product acumen to reason about technical tradeoffs in terms of user impact.
- Familiarity with AI agent tooling: evaluation frameworks, RAG pipelines and prompt engineering.
- A fundamental understanding of complex data structures and algorithms; ability to develop and apply new solutions and confidently navigate and improve existing code.
- Data-driven analytical skills for decision-making, stakeholder alignment, and experiment-oriented delivery.
- Solid project management abilities.
- Excellent written and verbal communication to validate and articulate decisions.
- Previous experience leading and mentoring experienced engineers, supporting their career goals, and unlocking their potential.
- Attend meetings on camera via video conferencing.
- Expect to travel at least two times a year for an all-hands meetup and a team retreat, each around 4–5 days. While extenuating circumstances may impact attendance, everyone is strongly encouraged to attend.
- Pass a background check as a condition of joining the team.
From the company page
DuckDuckGo benefits
◉ Remote policy · in their words
“Remote First, Always: We've always been a fully distributed company with team members all over the world. We trust you to get your work done wherever, and whenever.”
Pulled from their careers page · verified by Atlas
The hot takeJeff's read on DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo has the only perfect score in our database, and is THE prototype for what we look for in a work-from-anywhere company. Well, not JUST a WFA company, but ANY company. Here's the core tenets we look for:
- Clear prioritization of working from anywhere as a business model.
- Clear expression of trust and empowerment for employees.
- Understanding that output > location or hours.
- Transparent perk package.
- Transparent salary offering per role.
- Emphasis of employees over mission statement.