Who We Are

Hi, we're DuckDuckGo, the online protection company and remote-first team of 300+ on a mission to raise the standard of trust online. Founded in 2008 and profitable since 2014, annual revenue now exceeds $100m USD and millions use our browser on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, our search engine, and the latest — Privacy Pro. Our culture of trust, inclusivity, and empowered project management underpins everything we do, where each team member takes full ownership of their projects, from scoping and execution to postmortem. If you're seeking end-to-end ownership of your work — you've come to the right place!

Your Team and Role

Working on the Design Functional Team, this role is design-first; leveraging your expertise in product design and obsessing over the details to help us maintain a high level of craft across our products, such as Duck.ai, native apps, and search. At DuckDuckGo, Design owns quality end to end, and that's where your engineering skills come in. The unique role you will have leverages your coding skills and engineering knowledge to ensure that the execution of our designs meets our quality bar. You're fluent enough in code to prototype, spec precisely, and partner with engineers as a peer to demonstrate how to interpret our designs and interaction. Your design engineering expertise will close the gap between the design that was intended and the product that actually ships by working directly in the codebase, and with our front-end engineers, to make sure execution clears the bar you set. You'll also be our 2nd Design Engineer at the company, so there are many leadership opportunities to help grow and shape the role and discipline.

As a Senior Design Engineer on the Product Design team you will collaborate with team members at all levels to identify and solve problems across our current product offering, as well as helping to pioneer new solutions as we build out the privacy layer for the Internet. You'll have the opportunity to level up our products through exploring and testing concepts that improve overall experience and increase delight while appealing to a broader audience.

Applying your hands-on design engineering skills, you will autonomously lead highly impactful projects that scale across millions of users. From ideation to execution, you'll assess vague problems, propose high-impact solutions, and execute them against a set of success criteria. You'll have a voice in all product-related design decisions, whether large or small, and an opportunity to work on a team dedicated to our ethical, privacy by design approach. Read more about Design at DuckDuckGo on our blog: https://spreadprivacy.com/ethical-by-design/

About You

1. 7+ years of experience in product design and/or design engineering roles, including 2+ years in senior-level design positions at significant global consumer brands.

2. Ability to communicate visual and interaction recommendations with high-quality mockups, prototypes, and rationale.

3. Comfortable partnering with engineers as a peer, reasoning about your decisions in PR reviews and contributing code where it's the fastest route to the right result.

4. Experience defining requirements and developing tools that help accelerate both design and engineering workflows, and retain both quality and consistency of our design system across design and code.

5. An ability to prototype in code to a production standard, with an understanding of semantic markup and accessibility, leveraging but not relying on AI tooling.

6. Fluency in motion and interaction as implemented behaviour, not just specified intent; easing curves, spring physics, and interruptible transitions that hold up under real conditions.

7. Experience structuring a design system beyond component inventory; token layering, primitive versus semantic naming, and holding parity between design source and