DuckDuckGo Senior Backend Engineer

We are a diverse team from around the world working together on a mission to make DuckDuckGo the world’s most trusted search engine, and we want your help! 

Join us as a Senior Backend Engineer and become part of the team creating the technology that powers the DuckDuckGo search experience.  

As part of our Backend Team you will be collaborating with team members at all levels to identify and close major gaps in the search engine. Examples of projects you might work on include: building out features like improved venue search, or running experiments to improve the usability of our search results. Over time you will be directly responsible for features on the search engine results page (SERP) and take ownership over product maintenance and improvement.

We are a remote company, we empower our team to work wherever they want around the world. That means you have to be self-directed and self-motivated to succeed. If that seems awesome and you like the idea of our core values -- Build trust, Question assumptions, and Validate direction -- you'll fit right in.

What you will do:

• Lead development of search projects by taking vague problems, scoping them into high impact projects, and executing them against a set of success criteria.


• Take responsibility for solving product issues – both big and small.


• Implement and/or create algorithms to improve the content we present on the SERP.


• Collaborate with peers on product brainstorms, technical design discussions, pair programming sessions and code reviews.


• Write pragmatic, testable code that works consistently and is performant.


• In time, take leadership responsibility for several senior engineers, mentoring them and helping them grow at DuckDuckGo.

What we are looking for:

• Significant backend engineering experience (around 6+ years).


• Expertise working on the backend side of at least one large application.


• Experience in leading engineering teams of 3+ people.


• Effective project management skills.


• Ability to develop and use complicated data structures and algorithms. This includes understanding the fundamentals, as well as navigating and improving existing code (ours is mostly written with Perl).


• Creative problem solvers and risk takers. You like to take initiative in pushing a project forward but know when to get others involved.


• Excellent communication skills. You can validate and communicate your decisions clearly.

Other things to know:

• We are a small, remote team in different time zones and communicate with a variety of tools throughout the day. You should feel comfortable with the intricacies of this type of work situation.


• Sometimes we meet up! You can expect to travel at least 2x a year: once for our all-hands meetup and another for a team retreat (each ~4-5 days)


• We want to have a major impact on raising the standard of trust online. To do this we believe in a focused approach, with company-wide objectives, and with each team member working on a single top priority at a time.


• Our work philosophy is built upon empowered project management. All team members have opportunities to run projects.


• All projects are run transparently, and we encourage everyone to participate in areas of interest throughout the company. Anyone and everyone can (and should) ask questions and offer feedback around the product and internal projects.


• We try to exemplify our values (build trust, question assumptions, and validate direction) in everything we do.


• While this is a full time job, we offer a flexible work arrangement with no core hours and expect an average commitment of 40 hours per week.


• We support professional development of our team members through career advisory and a learning stipend, reinforcing our culture of growth and skill building.

If you think you might thrive in this environment, we would love to hear from you using the application below.