Senior Backend Engineer

About DuckDuckGo: DuckDuckGo is the online protection company and remote-first team of 300+ on a mission to raise the standard of trust online.

About The 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, Architecting and delivering the VPN in our Privacy Pro subscription, 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.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and development of systems that optimize network traffic and scale for global expansion
• Drive architectural decisions for high-impact projects, ensuring scalability and reliability
• Co-author long-term technical roadmaps that set the vision for network scalability, performance, and engineering velocity
• Build and nurture effective partnerships across engineering, product, and security teams
• Drive the design and implementation of “secure by default” network systems in collaboration with security teams
• Act as a key stakeholder by engaging with customers and internal teams to understand business requirements and deliver innovative solutions

Required Skills:

• Proven experience leading complex engineering efforts focused on network traffic management, network optimization, and cloud orchestration
• Exceptional collaboration and communication skills, with a demonstrated ability to align stakeholders and lead cross-functional teams
• A track record of contributing to long-term technical roadmaps and making thoughtful system-level tradeoffs
• At least 8+ years of coding experience in languages like Go, Java, or similar, with strong expertise in writing concurrent and distributed code
• Extensive experience designing and building distributed systems, leveraging concurrency primitives, and optimizing network performance
• Deep expertise in traffic and networking systems, with familiarity across adjacent infrastructure domains
• Hands-on experience with cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and the ability to optimize cost, performance, and scalability

Compensation: $178,500 USD annually and stock options