Senior Product Design Engineer at DuckDuckGo

Who We Are

Join DuckDuckGo, a remote-first online protection company dedicated to raising the standard of trust online. Founded in 2008 and profitable since 2014, our annual revenue exceeds $100M USD. Millions worldwide use our privacy-focused products, including our browser on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, our search engine, and the innovative Privacy Pro service.

Our culture emphasizes trust, inclusivity, and empowered project management, where every team member takes full ownership of their projects, from initial scoping and execution to post-launch analysis. If you thrive with end-to-end ownership of your work, DuckDuckGo is the ideal environment for you.

Your Team and Role

As a Senior Design Engineer, you will be an integral part of our Design Functional Team. This is a design-first role where your expertise in product design and meticulous attention to detail will be crucial in maintaining a high level of craft across our diverse product suite, including Duck.ai, native applications, and our search engine.

At DuckDuckGo, the Design team takes full ownership of quality. Your unique blend of design and engineering skills will bridge the gap between intended design and the final product that ships. You will leverage your coding proficiency to prototype, specify designs precisely, and collaborate closely with front-end engineers to ensure design interpretation and execution meet our stringent quality standards. This involves directly contributing to the codebase when it is the most efficient path to achieving the desired result.

As our second Design Engineer, you will have significant leadership opportunities to help shape and expand this crucial role and discipline within the company. You will collaborate across all levels to identify and solve complex problems within our current product offerings, and pioneer innovative solutions as we build the next generation of internet privacy layers. You will enhance our products by exploring and testing new concepts, improving overall user experience, increasing delight, and appealing to a broader audience. You will autonomously lead high-impact projects that scale to millions of users, from ideation to successful execution against defined criteria. Your voice will be heard in all product-related design decisions, upholding our ethical, privacy by design approach. Discover more about our design philosophy on our blog: Ethical by Design.

About You: Qualifications and Experience

• Extensive Experience: You possess 7+ years of experience in product design and/or design engineering roles, including at least 2 years in senior-level design positions at prominent global consumer brands.
• Visual Communication: You can effectively communicate visual and interaction recommendations through high-quality mockups, prototypes, and clear rationale.
• Engineering Partnership: You are comfortable partnering with engineers as a peer, articulating your decisions during PR reviews, and contributing code directly when it accelerates the desired outcome.
• Design System Development: You have experience defining requirements and developing tools that enhance both design and engineering workflows, ensuring consistency and quality within design systems across design source and code.
• Production-Ready Prototyping: You can prototype in code to a production standard, demonstrating a strong understanding of semantic markup and accessibility, while effectively leveraging (but not relying on) AI tools.
• Motion & Interaction Fluency: You are fluent in motion and interaction as implemented behavior, understanding easing curves, spring physics, and interruptible transitions that perform reliably in real-world conditions.
• Advanced Design System Structuring: You have experience structuring design systems beyond mere component inventories, including token layering, primitive vs. semantic naming, and maintaining parity between design source and code.
• Project Management Expertise: You are proficient in managing projects of varying complexity, from initial proposal through execution and release, always working transparently and collaborating effectively with cross-functional stakeholders.
• Agentic Problem Solving: You are accustomed to applying agentic solutions to everyday project management and design execution workflows to both accelerate and elevate the quality of your work.
• Clear Communication: You possess the ability to write creative briefs that clearly define and communicate project goals, rationale, and success metrics to stakeholders.
• Research & Experimentation: You are proficient in research and experimentation, leveraging both qualitative and quantitative data to drive decisions and comfortably instrumenting your own work for measurement.
• Proactive & Collaborative: You demonstrate initiative in generating ideas and driving them forward with urgency and discretion, while fostering an open and collaborative work environment.