Staff 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.

Your Team and Role

Working on the Data Science Functional Team, you'll drive product and business impact through improving our search engine ranking and results. Recent projects include:

• Improving first-phase ranking quality and precision without sacrificing latency.
• Developing new lexical-matching and document-authority signals.
• Expanding our search evaluations to measure relevancy readiness and surface ranking blindspots.
• Investigating LLMs for feature generation and ranking.

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

• 10+ years of experience in Data Science, with 2+ years at Staff, Principal, or Director level, and a track record of leading high-complexity projects from scoping to production with minimal direction.
• Comfortable advising others on complex data science work.
• Able to develop strategies for ambiguous, complex data science problems and turn them into a series of well-defined projects.
• Hands-on experience deploying ML in production, developing NLP solutions, and utilizing AI-assisted development.
• Write production-grade code in Python or a comparable high-level language.
• Advanced SQL and query optimization skills.
• Collaborate effectively with product teams and contribute to overall team throughput.

Preferred Experience

• Running search-specific projects (ranking, retrieval, or indexing) from scoping to production.
• Working with large-scale search infrastructure (e.g., Vespa, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Solr).

Compensation & Benefits

• Compensation: $222,033 USD annually + 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 available for US-based team members.
• Support & Perks: Paid parental leave, office setup allowance, and co-working allowances.

Key Details & Requirements

• Flexible work arrangement with no core hours (average 40 hours per week commitment).
• Required attendance on video calls with camera on.
• Travel at least twice per year for our annual all-hands meetup and team retreat (4–5 days each).
• Successful completion of a background check is required upon hire.