Senior Data Scientist - 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. If you're seeking end-to-end ownership of your work, you've come to the right place!

Your Team and Role

Working on the Data Science Functional Team, you'll drive product and business impact through statistical modeling, experiment design, Bayesian marketing analysis, and classifier implementation across our search engine, instant answers, AI, and revenue optimization, and work on related projects.

Recent Projects Include:

• Defining core growth metrics for our products and building the infrastructure to monitor trends and anomalies.
• Measuring the impact of major marketing campaigns for Duck.ai, translating full-funnel data into actionable decisions.
• Building monitoring pipelines to detect unexpected shifts in search traffic patterns faster and more reliably.
• Expanding evaluation datasets for page context understanding across complex scenarios like multi-tab browsing and content reattachment.
• Improving the trigger systems that determine when AI-assisted answers surface in DuckDuckGo Search, balancing quality and our privacy-first approach.

Our data meets rigorous privacy standards and is necessarily sparse, so you'll need to think creatively to surface actionable insights in an evidence-first culture where quantitative rigor is the baseline, not the exception.

About You

• You have 7+ years of experience in Data Science and a track record of leading high-complexity projects from scoping to production with minimal direction.
• You can do 2 or more of the following:
  • Deploy and iterate on ML in production environments.
  • Develop and deploy NLP solutions.
  • Apply knowledge of LLMs including fine-tuning, LLM-as-judge, and AI-assisted development.
  • Conduct marketing campaign analysis using Bayesian methods.
• You write production-grade code in Python or a comparable high-level language.
• You have advanced SQL and query optimization skills, familiarity with columnar databases like BigQuery, Clickhouse, Redshift, or Druid; experience with a BI tool like Tableau or PowerBI is a plus.
• You can design, implement, and analyze experiments across product surfaces, and are comfortable deriving insights from sparse or privacy-constrained data.
• You collaborate effectively with product teams and contribute to overall team throughput.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary: $178,500 USD annually and stock options. Compensation is transparent across the organization, and all team members within the same professional level and global region receive the same compensation.
• Health Benefits: Eligibility for company-sponsored health benefits is limited to team members based in the United States. This program does not extend to team members located in other countries, such as Canada or the UK.
• Wellbeing & Support: Paid parental leave, office setup, and co-working allowances.

Additional Details

• Travel: Expect to travel at least two times a year: once for our all-hands meetup and again for a team retreat (each around 4-5 days).
• Work Hours: Flexible work arrangement with no core hours, with an average full-time commitment of 40 hours per week.
• Background Check: A successful candidate must pass a background check as a condition of joining the team.
• Video Meetings: You’ll be required to attend meetings on camera via video conferencing.