We are a fully distributed, diverse team from around the world, on a mission to make DuckDuckGo the company people trust most with their online privacy, and we want your help!

Join us as a Senior Privacy Engineer and help build the privacy technology that underlies DuckDuckGo's search engine, mobile apps and browser extensions.

As part of our growing Privacy Engineering team, you will collaborate with team members at all levels to improve our existing privacy technology, research and understand new online privacy threats and contribute to the development of solutions to protect users against them. Examples of projects you might work on include: researching how browser fingerprinting is happening in the wild and developing solutions to protect our users against it, running experiments to measure and improve the usability of privacy features across our products, and taking ownership of the technology that powers our privacy solutions (e.g. a crawler that identifies trackers on the web or the cross-platform implementation of tracker blocking in our apps and extensions). 

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 projects from proposal through postmortem, assessing vague problems, proposing high impact solutions, and executing them against a set of success criteria.

• Contribute to and demonstrate ownership over major components of our privacy technology, taking responsibility for their maintenance and improvement over time.

• Represent DuckDuckGo externally as part of industry privacy working groups, conferences or standards body discussions.

• Step up to resolve product issues that impact our users – large and small.

• Play a key role in improving our software architecture (in both our user-facing products, and internal processes) with the goal of increasing quality and throughput.

• Mentor peers through remote collaboration opportunities, including: product brainstorms, technical design discussions, pair programming sessions and code reviews.

• Write pragmatic, testable code that works consistently across devices.

What we are looking for:

• Experience working on privacy solutions in an engineering capacity (e.g. tracker blocker, password manager, or similar technology).

• Deep understanding of web technologies, how they can be exploited and how they can be used to prevent against exploits.

• Deep technical understanding of online privacy threats and the existing solution space to protect against them.

• Proficiency in JavaScript.

• Effective project management skills.

• Creative problem solvers and risk takers. You like to take initiative to push projects forward but know when to involve others.

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

Other things to know:

• While we leverage specific job titles for hiring purposes, we do not use them internally. Instead, we follow our own professional levels, with expectations for each level clearly defined across several dimensions.

• We are a small, remote team distributed across time zones, and we rely on a variety of communication tools throughout the day

• Sometimes we meet up! Expect to travel at least two times a year: once for our all-hands meetup and again for a team retreat (each ~4-5 days).

• We believe in a focused approach to collaboration, where individual team members work on a single top priority at a time, each supporting larger, company-wide objectives. This philosophy serves to impact our vision to raise the standard of trust online.

• Our work philosophy centers on empowered project management. All team members have opportunities to run projects.

• Transparency supports individual and team success at DuckDuckGo. We encourage everyone to participate in areas of interest throughout the company. Anyone and everyone can (and should) ask questions and offer feedback about our products and internal projects.

• We aim 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, expecting 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.

DuckDuckGo does not work with any recruiting agencies or services.  A big part of our culture is to work with each candidate on a one-to-one basis throughout our unique hiring process.

DuckDuckGo provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment, and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

If you think you might thrive in this environment, we would love to hear from you. Use the application to apply!