Director, Site Reliability Engineering

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 on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, our search engine, and the DuckDuckGo subscription. We also offer private, useful, and optional AI, including Duck.ai, which lets you chat privately with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AIs, all in one place. 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 Site Reliability Team, you'll help build and maintain world-class infrastructure to meet the needs of millions of users protecting their privacy online. You'll utilize high-level languages like Perl, Go, TypeScript, or Python and work on related projects. Recent projects include:

• Ensuring our Duck.ai product meets our reliability standards and minimizing user friction on failures
• Scaling up our own index infrastructure to handle billions of documents
• Create anti fraud verifications that respect users privacy

As Director, Site Reliability Engineering, you'll dive deep into complex operational challenges, including software, systems, automation, and process analysis. We are looking for candidates who can read, write, troubleshoot, and deploy all types of software to help us tackle the reliability challenges of large-scale deployments.

About You

• 10+ years relevant professional experience in reliability, platform, infrastructure, or software engineering, including 4+ years leading SRE teams.
• Experience participating in a 24x7 on-call rotation for a large-scale deployment.
• Ability to lead and collaborate on high-impact and complex projects from proposal through postmortem.
• Proficient in AI-driven development, including designing and implementing agentic workflows
• Skills to wrangle vague problems, propose innovative solutions, and execute them with a strong focus on metrics.
• Experience developing effective tools, services, alerts, and responses to identify and address reliability risks.
• Investigative ability to root-cause sources of instability in high-traffic, distributed systems.
• Deep experience administering and troubleshooting Linux and web technologies.
• Ability to implement automation around infrastructure provisioning and configuration management to prioritize efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
• Foresight to help identify the future technical direction of our deployment with the goal of improving reliability and performance.
• Advanced programming skills enabling close partnership with software engineers to triage production issues and identify appropriate remediation, including code changes and performance considerations.
• Ability to leverage cloud-native services and architectures to enhance reliability and scalability, with hands-on experience packaging and deploying applications using Docker and Docker Compose.

Please note that:

• You’ll be required to attend meetings on camera via video conferencing
• 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.
• While we offer a flexible work arrangement with no core hours, expect an average full-time commitment of 40 hours per week.
• A successful candidate must pass a background check as a condition of joining the team.
• 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.

Disclosure Statement: Use of AI in Hiring Process

As part of our commitment to enhancing our recruitment process, we utilize artificial intelligence (AI) technology to assist in reviewing and summarizing job applications and test projects, including those tools integrated into our recruitment vendor platforms. We use AI to flag potentially fraudulent applications, analyze and summarize applicants’ experience, interviews, and project performance, and help streamline our selection process.

Key Principles:

• Data Privacy: All information provided in your application will be handled in accordance with our Recruiting Privacy Policy. We ensure that your personal information is protected and used solely for recruitment purposes.