Senior Backend Engineer - DuckDuckGo

Who We Are

Hi, we're DuckDuckGo, the online protection company and 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, all 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 Backend Functional Team, you'll lead complex projects across key company-wide objectives. Using Perl (Version 5), Go, and Node.js, you’ll write pragmatic, performant, testable code that works consistently, and work on related projects.

Recent projects include:

• Implementing AI-assisted answers and integrating them into our Search product while maintaining our privacy-first approach
• Delivering improvements to Duck.ai to help us make it a competitive AI chat alternative for both free and paying users
• Implementing sophisticated data processing pipelines that maintain search relevancy

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll collaborate remotely with your peers and take responsibility for solving product issues impacting our all-in-one privacy solution, whether large or small. In time, you'll formally mentor other engineers, supporting their career growth and the growth of the Backend Team at DuckDuckGo.

About You

• 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 — you can 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

Compensation & Benefits

• Base Salary: $178,500 USD annually + stock options
• Health Benefits: Company-sponsored health benefits for US-based team members
• Perks: Paid parental leave, office setup allowance, and co-working allowance

Additional Expectations

• Attendance on video calls with camera on
• Travel required at least twice a year for company all-hands and team retreats (4-5 days each)
• Full-time commitment averaging 40 hours per week with no core required hours