Senior Backend Engineer
DuckDuckGo · Remote · USA (Remote) · Slovakia (Remote) · Spain (Remote) · Czechia (Remote) · Switzerland (Remote) · Estonia (Remote) · Mexico (Remote) · Israel (Remote) · Bulgaria (Remote) · Austria (Remote) · Iceland (Remote) · Croatia (Remote) · Hungary (Remote) · I ·
COMPENSATION
$178k – $178k
Listed on the employer's job board (Ashby)
- Senior Backend Engineer
- Fully remote worldwide
- Perl, Go, Node.js
- AI & Search focus
- Mentorship role
Join the Backend Functional Team at DuckDuckGo to build and improve privacy-first products like Search and Duck.ai. You will write performant code, implement AI-assisted features, and manage sophisticated data processing pipelines.
This position offers end-to-end ownership of your work, from scoping to execution. You will collaborate remotely with peers and formally mentor other engineers to support their career growth.
What you'll do
- Lead complex projects across key company-wide objectives
- Write pragmatic, performant, and testable code
- Implement AI-assisted answers into the Search product
- Deliver improvements to Duck.ai for free and paying users
- Build data processing pipelines to maintain search relevancy
- Solve product issues impacting the privacy solution
- Mentor other engineers and support their career growth
What you'll need
- 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience
- Experience powering consumer-facing products
- Ability to reason about technical tradeoffs and user impact
- Familiarity with AI agent tooling and RAG pipelines
- Strong understanding of complex data structures and algorithms
- Data-driven analytical skills for decision making
- Solid project management abilities
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Previous experience leading and mentoring engineers
Nice to have
- Experience with prompt engineering
- Experience with evaluation frameworks for AI agents
Stack
- Perl
- Go
- Node.js
How you'll work
- Fully remote position
- No core hours, flexible arrangement
- Average 40 hours per week commitment
- Video conferencing required for meetings
- Travel twice a year for meetups and retreats
What you get
- Stock options included in compensation
- Transparent regional pay scales
- Paid parental leave
- Office setup allowance
- Co-working allowances
- US-based health benefits eligibility
Hiring process
- Application review using AI tools
- Background check required for hiring