Privacy Engineering Director - DuckDuckGo

Who We Are

DuckDuckGo is the online protection company and a remote-first team of 300+ on a mission to raise the standard of trust online. Founded in 2008 and profitable since 2014, annual revenue now exceeds $100M USD, and millions use our browser on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, our search engine, and the DuckDuckGo subscription. We also offer private, useful, and optional AI, including Duck.ai, which lets you chat privately with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AIs in one place.

Our culture of trust, inclusivity, and empowered project management underpins everything we do, where each team member takes full ownership of their projects, from scoping and execution to postmortem.

Your Team and Role

Working on the Privacy Functional Team, you'll be a privacy engineering leader at DuckDuckGo, stepping in on the most complex, ambiguous, and high-stakes privacy challenges across our products. Using deep expertise in privacy engineering, audit frameworks, and cross-functional collaboration, you'll lead critical privacy initiatives that shape the future of private browsing, private search, agentic computing, and related projects.

Recent Projects Include:

• Building a privacy engineering framework for DuckDuckGo's agentic browsing products, solving novel challenges around user data in AI-assisted workflows.
• Designing technical solutions to enable private search index capabilities while preserving strict privacy guarantees at scale.

As Engineering Director, Privacy, you'll own high-complexity privacy projects from definition to delivery, evolve our privacy triage and review processes, build automation that reduces engineering toil, and grow the next generation of privacy engineers—all while contributing significantly to privacy strategy across the company.

About You

• 10+ years of experience leading privacy reviews, audits, or technical privacy programs at a consumer-facing product company with a large (1M+) user base.
• 4+ years of privacy engineering leadership experience building infrastructure tools, data minimization systems, or equivalent privacy-preserving technical solutions.
• Director, Head of, or VP-level experience with direct management and hiring responsibilities and meaningful technical scope.
• Proven ability to directly responsible individual (DRI) high-complexity, cross-functional projects with minimal direction.
• Strong communication skills with a track record of translating privacy principles into practical engineering decisions across competing stakeholder needs.
• Experience improving organizational processes—identifying bottlenecks, implementing automation, and building scalable review systems.
• Passion for privacy and raising the standard of trust online.

Compensation & Benefits

• Compensation: $243,800 USD annually + stock options. Compensation is transparent across the organization, and all team members within the same professional level and global region receive equal pay.
• Health Benefits: Company-sponsored health benefits available for US-based team members.
• Perks: Paid parental leave, home office setup allowance, and co-working allowances.

Key Work Expectations

• Flexible work arrangement with no core hours; average full-time commitment of 40 hours per week.
• Required video conferencing attendance on camera for team meetings.
• Travel at least twice per year for company all-hands meetups and team retreats (4-5 days each).
• Background check required upon offer acceptance.