Senior Site Reliability Engineer

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

At DuckDuckGo, we currently serve 100+ million search queries a day (nearly doubling each year), anonymously leverage over 400 upstream sources for results, and serve more than 1PB of proxied traffic per month. Our app is now downloaded more than 78M times a year, and our private search engine packaged with it has become the #2 search engine on mobile in the United States and 18 other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. Oh, and we've been profitable since 2014, with revenue 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.

Join us as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help build and maintain world-class infrastructure to meet the needs of millions of users seeking to protect their privacy online. 

The Opportunity

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!

In this role you will be expected to:

• Lead projects from proposal through postmortem, assessing vague problems, proposing high-impact solutions, estimating effort and duration, and executing them against a set of success criteria.
• Develop effective tools, services, alerts and responses to identify and address reliability risks.
• Enhance our automation around infrastructure provisioning and configuration management to prioritize efficiency, scalability and reliability.
• Help identify the future technical direction of our deployment with an effort to improve reliability and performance.
• Work closely with software engineers to triage production issues and identify appropriate remediation, including code changes and performance considerations.
• Participate in our on-call rotation. Currently, there are two daily shifts, covering the North American Eastern Time Zone (12AM-12PM and 12PM-12AM). Exact shift schedules may be subject to change in future, but currently we expect you to be on-call for one week, about every 4-5 weeks. During this week, you will be scheduled 12PM-12AM Eastern Time (including the weekend), with an expectation of being about 10 minutes away from a keyboard while outside of your primary working hours.

What You Will Bring to DuckDuckGo

• At least 5+ years of experience in SRE focused roles responsible for supporting, scaling and ensuring reliability of end-to-end infrastructures.
• Experience with observability and monitoring of systems and services, and defining KPIs to track their health.
• Experience with production troubleshooting, including: distributed systems, code, storage, networking, operating systems (Linux) and databases.
• Moderate-to-advanced programming experience, preferably in a high-level language like Perl or Python.
• Experience participating in a 24x7 on-call rotation for a large-scale deployment.
• Effective project management skills; you have successfully launched projects from inception to production, utilizing strong communication skills and effective stakeholder management.

COMPENSATION

Annual compensation: $176,000 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.

YOUR WELL-BEING

Maintaining satisfaction at work is one of our company objectives, just like maintaining and improving our private search engine. Our Team Member Support Guide explains how we make you our top priority.

DUCKDUCKGO CULTURE

For over a decade, we've built a unique culture that helps us continuously improve job satisfaction and productivity. Want to know more? Check out DuckDuckGo Culture: How We Work for an overview of how we collaborate worldwide.

OTHER THINGS TO KNOW

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 ~4-5 days).
2. While this is a full-time job and we offer a flexible work arrangement with no core hours, expect an average commitment of 40 hours per week.

HIRING PROCESS

Hiring works best when it's a two-way street. Learn how we help you get to know DuckDuckGo and envision your future role here. Find out more about how we hire.

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 [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. By applying for this role, you confirm that information submitted is accurate and that you understand falsification is cause for denial of employment or termination.
2. 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.
3. While we offer a flexible work arrangement with no core hours, expect an average full-time commitment of 40 hours per week.
4. 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.
5. 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.

#LI-DNI

Please see Requirements above!