Sr. Site Reliability Engineer

Hi, we’re DuckDuckGo, the Internet privacy company for everyone who wants to take back their privacy now. For over a decade, we’ve been building our product, including new privacy technology, and working with policymakers to make online privacy simple and accessible for all.

Our app is now downloaded more than 75M times a year, and our private search engine packaged with it has become the #2 search engine on mobile in over 21 countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. Oh, and we’ve been profitable since 2014 with revenue currently exceeding $100 million a year! Now, we’re rolling out a suite of new privacy solutions, including Email Protection, App Tracking Protection and our first-ever Desktop Apps for Mac and Windows.

We’re looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help shape our all-in-one privacy solution and join our mission to show the world that protecting your privacy online can be simple.

As part of our growing team, you will be dedicated to improving and scaling the reliability of our end-to-end infrastructure. We dive deep into complex operational challenges, including software, systems, automation, and process analysis. We are looking for candidates that can read, write, troubleshoot, and deploy all types of software as we face unique challenges in privacy and scale.

We empower our team to be self-directed and self-motivated in their work. If you’d thrive in that environment, and our core values resonate with you — 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.
• Develop effective tools, services, alerts, and responses to identify and address reliability risks.
• Work closely with search engineers to triage production issues and identify appropriate remediation, including code changes and performance considerations.
• Participate in our on-call rotation; triage and address reliability issues that come up in production.
• Help identify the future technical direction of our deployment with an effort to improve reliability and performance.
• We expect SRE team members to handle on-call shifts. Currently these are weekly rotations covering US Eastern Time Zone 0000-1200 and 1200-0000 – exact shift schedules may be subject to change in future, but currently we expect you to be on call for 1 week every 4-5 weeks. 

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR:

• At least 7 years of engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on tackling the reliability challenges of large-scale deployments and high-traffic, distributed systems
• Experience with production troubleshooting, including: distributed systems, code, storage, networking, and operating systems
• Moderate-to-advanced programming experience, preferably in a high-level language like Perl or Python
• Experience participating in a 24×7 on-call rotation for a large-scale deployment.
• Experience configuring and troubleshooting Linux and NGiNX
• Strong organizational skills, you have an eye for detail and are not afraid to use it!
• Effective project management skills; you have successfully launched projects from inception to production
• Strong communication skills: You clearly articulate, in verbal and written communication, your recommendations and decisions
• Comfortable providing feedback to an array of stakeholders, both internal and external
• Experience with email infrastructure at scale is a plus

How We Will Support You:

Our core values — build trust, question assumptions, and validate direction — underpin how we work day-to-day and the support we give our team members. We strive to empower our team members to be self-directed and self-motivated in their work.

• Remote First, Always: We’ve always been a fully distributed company with team members all over the world. We trust you to get your work done wherever, whenever.

• Commitment to Personal Growth: Every team member has an annual budget of $1,250 USD to invest in their professional development. Every team member also has a dedicated Career Advisor, who serves as a guide to help you develop your strengths, identify your motivations, and understand your opportunities for growth.

• Leadership: We have many different types of leaders and possible combinations of leadership roles, so you can grow your career in a way that aligns best with your personal goals. You can seek additional leadership roles by being directly responsible for projects, taking ownership of areas of the company, developing and maintaining internal processes, or pursuing advisory roles.
• Work/Life Balance: Team members have the freedom and flexibility to organize their own work schedules. We want you to thrive both in and out of the office. We trust you to use good judgment and take the time off that you need to bring your best self to work.

Annual compensation: $170,000 USD and stock options. Compensation is the same within a professional level, regardless of geographic location or functional area, and the compensation for each professional level is transparent across the organization.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:

DuckDuckGo provides equal work opportunities to all team members and applicants, and it prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, caste, religion, age, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by our policies or federal, state, or local laws.

We want to ensure that our hiring process is accessible. If you need reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process because of a medical condition or disability, please send an email to c[email protected] to let us know the nature of your request.

If you think you might thrive in this environment, we would love to hear from you.

Please note that:

1. 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 around 4-5 days). While extenuating circumstances may impact attendance, everyone is strongly encouraged to attend.
2. While we offer a flexible work arrangement with no core hours, expect an average full-time commitment of 40 hours per week.
3. A successful candidate will be subject to a background check and must receive satisfactory results of the same, as a condition of joining the team.
4. By applying for this role, you confirm that all information submitted is accurate and complete. You further acknowledge that providing false or fraudulent information during the application process is cause for denial of an offer, revocation of any existing offer, or other adverse action, up to and including termination after the start of your commencement of work.

Apply now >