We are a diverse and fully-distributed team from around the world, working toward our shared vision to raise the standard of trust online.

Join us as a Site Reliability Engineer at DuckDuckGo and become part of the team shaping our growing infrastructure. As a member of our Operations team, you will work together with your peers to keep the search engine online, stable, and fast. You will leverage your expertise to challenge our assumptions about the reliability of our deployment and the effectiveness of our processes as we strive to improve. 

DuckDuckGo is a fully-remote company and our employees live all over the world!  We empower our team with personal autonomy on team projects. This means you must be self-directed and self-motivated to succeed. If that seems awesome and you identify with our core values -- build trust, question assumptions, and validate direction -- then you'll fit right in. 

What you will do:

• Lead high complexity projects from scoping to deployment to production.

• Develop effective tools, alerts, and responses to identify and address reliability risks.

• Work closely with search engineers to triage production issues and determine appropriate remediation including code changes and performance considerations.

• Share on-call responsibilities -- collaborating with other engineers to triage and fix reliability issues that come up in production and autonomously put out fires that may come up.

• Help determine the future technical direction of our deployment with an effort to improve reliability and performance.

What we are looking for:

• Significant experience as a site reliability engineer, including on-call responsibilities (around 5+ years).

• Ability to root-cause sources of instability on high-traffic, distributed systems.

• Experience with configuration and troubleshooting of Linux and NGiNX.

• Strong understanding of reliability challenges of large-scale deployments.

• Moderate-to-advanced programming experience, preferably in a high-level language like Perl or Python.

• Effective project management skills.

• Strong critical thinking skills. You make sound decisions when faced with competing priorities and limited information.

• Someone interested in the why, not just the how. You like to analyze situations and won't be satisfied with a shallow analysis.

• Creative problem-solvers and risk-takers. You like to take initiative in pushing a project forward, but can make adjustments based on team feedback.

• Someone who will put the user first in on-call and project work.

• Strong communication skills. You can validate and communicate your decisions 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!