Senior Backend Engineer

Who We Are Hi, we're DuckDuckGo, the online protection company and remote-first team of 400+ on a mission to raise the standard of trust online. Founded in 2008 and profitable since 2014, our annual revenue is in the hundreds of millions 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 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 You7+ 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 This role is paid on a regional pay scale, in local currency, and stock options:

United States: $190,500 USD annually

United Kingdom: £134,600 GBP annually

Canada: C$253,500 CAD annually

Europe/Rest of World: €157,350 EUR annually