Senior Privacy 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. 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 Privacy Functional Team, you'll lead complex projects across key company-wide objectives. You'll protect the privacy of our users using Go, Node.js, Python, and (sometimes) Perl to write pragmatic, performant, testable code, and work on related projects.

Potential projects include:

• Designing systems for improving our search indexes and AI features without compromising user privacy.
• Building new features on top of our Tracker Radar crawler to detect emerging privacy threats.
• Implementing new privacy features and maintaining existing ones, such as our Web Tracking and Email Protections.

As a Senior Privacy Engineer, you'll own major components of our privacy technology, taking responsibility for their maintenance and improvement over time. A key part of the role will also be participation in our privacy review and audit processes, ensuring that all product developments align with our privacy principles. In time, you'll formally mentor other engineers, supporting their career growth and the growth of the Privacy Team at DuckDuckGo.

About You

• Ability to lead and collaborate on high-impact and complex projects from proposal through post-mortem.
• Skills to wrangle vague problems, propose innovative solutions, and execute them effectively, involving others when necessary.
• Experience working on privacy solutions in an engineering capacity (e.g., tracker blocker, differential privacy, or similar technology).
• Deep technical understanding of online privacy threats and the existing solution space to protect against them.
• Proficiency in any of the following: Go, Node.js, Python, Perl.
• Excellent communication skills. You can validate your decisions and communicate them clearly to a variety of audiences, including non-technical stakeholders.

Compensation & Benefits

• Compensation: $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.
• Support & Wellbeing: Paid parental leave, office setup allowance, and co-working allowances as detailed in our Team Member Support Guide.

Important Considerations

• Attendance in meetings on camera via video conferencing is required.
• Travel at least two times a year for an all-hands meetup and team retreat (each around 4–5 days).
• Flexible work arrangement with no core hours, with an average full-time commitment of 40 hours per week.
• Successful completion of a background check is required.