Senior Product Design Engineer

DuckDuckGo is an online privacy company with a remote-first team of roughly 300 people. Founded in 2008 and profitable since 2014, it now brings in over $100 million a year in revenue across its search engine, its browsers for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, and its Privacy Pro subscription. The culture is built around end-to-end ownership: individuals scope, execute, and run the postmortem on their own projects.

The role

This is a design-first position on the Design Functional Team, and it would make you the company's second Design Engineer. Design at DuckDuckGo owns quality all the way through to shipping, which is where the engineering half comes in. You would work directly in the codebase alongside front-end engineers to close the gap between the design that was intended and the product that actually reaches users.

Because the discipline is still new here, there is real scope to shape how the role works rather than inheriting someone else's definition of it.

What you would work on

• Leading high-impact design projects across products used by millions, from vague problem through to shipped result
• Prototyping in code to a production standard, and specifying precisely enough that engineers can build without guesswork
• Partnering with engineers as a peer, including reasoning through decisions in PR reviews and contributing code when that is the fastest path
• Building tools that speed up design and engineering workflows while keeping the design system consistent across both
• Testing concepts that improve the overall experience across Duck.ai, native apps, and search
• Contributing to product design decisions of every size, on a team committed to privacy by design

Background they are looking for

• 7+ years in product design or design engineering, with at least 2 years at senior level for a significant global consumer brand
• Strong communication of visual and interaction decisions through mockups, prototypes, and clear rationale
• Production-standard prototyping with a grasp of semantic markup and accessibility, using AI tooling as a help rather than a crutch
• Real fluency in motion and interaction as implemented behaviour, not just specified intent: easing curves, spring physics, interruptible transitions that survive real conditions
• Design system experience beyond a component inventory, covering token layering, primitive versus semantic naming, and parity between design source and code
• Comfort applying agentic tooling to project management and design execution
• Skill in research and experimentation, including instrumenting your own work so measurement is not handed off
• Ability to write creative briefs that make goals, rationale, and success metrics legible to stakeholders

Compensation

• $178,500 USD annually, plus stock options
• Pay is identical within a professional level regardless of geography or team, and every level's compensation is published internally
• Company-sponsored health benefits are available only to team members based in the United States, and do not extend to other countries such as Canada or the UK
• Paid parental leave, office setup, and co-working allowances are covered in their published Team Member Support Guide

Practical details worth knowing

• Meetings are attended on camera by video
• Expect to travel at least twice a year, for an all-hands and a team retreat, each roughly four to five days
• Hours are flexible with no core hours, against an average 40-hour week
• A background check is required before joining
• DuckDuckGo discloses that it uses AI to review and summarise applications and test projects, with final decisions made by the hiring team. Candidates can request an alternative process by contacting their careers address.

The flat global pay rate is unusual and worth weighing: someone doing this job from Lisbon or Buenos Aires earns the same as someone doing it from New York.