Staff Data Scientist at DuckDuckGo at DuckDuckGo

Who We Are

Join DuckDuckGo, the online protection company and a remote-first team of over 300 dedicated professionals. Our mission is to elevate the standard of trust online. Established in 2008, we have been profitable since 2014, with annual revenues surpassing $100 million USD. Millions of users enjoy our browser on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, as well as our search engine and the DuckDuckGo subscription. We also provide private, useful, and optional AI features, including Duck.ai, which allows private chats with AI models like ChatGPT and Claude in one place. Our culture emphasizes trust, inclusivity, and empowered project management, where each team member takes full ownership of their projects, from initial scoping and execution to post-mortem analysis. If you are seeking end-to-end ownership and impact, DuckDuckGo is the place for you!

Your Team and Role

As a key member of the Data Science Functional Team, you will significantly impact product and business outcomes by enhancing our search engine's ranking and results quality. Recent impactful projects include:

• Improving first-phase ranking quality and precision while maintaining low latency.
• Developing innovative lexical-matching and document-authority signals.
• Expanding our search evaluations to accurately measure relevancy readiness and identify ranking blindspots.
• Investigating Large Language Models (LLMs) for advanced feature generation and improved ranking algorithms.

Given our strict privacy standards, our data is inherently sparse, requiring you to think creatively to uncover actionable insights. We foster an evidence-first culture where quantitative rigor is the fundamental expectation, not an exception.

About You

• You possess 10+ years of experience in Data Science, including 2+ years at Staff, Principal, or Director level, with a proven history of leading highly complex projects from conception to production with minimal oversight.
• You are adept at providing expert guidance to others on intricate data science initiatives.
• You can formulate strategic approaches for ambiguous and complex data science challenges, transforming them into a series of well-defined, executable projects.
• You have hands-on experience deploying Machine Learning (ML) systems in production environments, developing Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions, and utilizing AI-assisted development techniques.
• You write production-grade code in Python or a comparable high-level programming language.
• You have advanced SQL and query optimization skills.
• You collaborate effectively with product teams, making substantial contributions to overall team productivity and throughput.
• Preferred experience includes:
  • Running search-specific projects (covering ranking, retrieval, or indexing) from initial scoping through to production deployment.
  • Working with large-scale search infrastructure such as Vespa, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Solr.