Senior Site Reliability Engineer

About DuckDuckGo

Join our fully distributed team and help raise the standard of trust online — from anywhere! DuckDuckGo is a remote company of 200+ passionate people from over 15 countries. Together, we're on a mission to show the world that protecting privacy can be simple. We embrace diverse perspectives and seek hardworking, self-motivated individuals.

Our app is now downloaded more than 75M times a year, and our private search engine packaged with it has become the #2 search engine on mobile in over 21 countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. Oh, and we've been profitable since 2014 with revenue currently 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.

• Take Back Your Schedule. No core hours means working when you're most productive, and taking time off when you need it.
• Love Where You Work. Since 2012, we've maintained an average team retention of over 90%. That's held as we doubled in size during 2019-20.
• Fair Pay For Everyone. Everyone at the same professional level earns the same pay regardless of factors like race, gender, age, and location.

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 careers@duckduckgo.com to let us know the nature of your request.

The Position

We’re looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help shape our all-in-one privacy solution and join our mission to show the world that protecting your privacy online can be simple.

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!

What you will do

• Lead projects from proposal through postmortem, assessing vague problems, proposing high-impact solutions, and executing them against a set of success criteria.
• Develop effective tools, services, alerts, and responses to identify and address reliability risks.
• Work closely with search engineers to triage production issues and identify appropriate remediation, including code changes and performance considerations.
• Participate in our on-call rotation; triage and address reliability issues that come up in production.
• Help identify the future technical direction of our deployment with an effort to improve reliability and performance.
• We expect SRE team members to handle on-call shifts. Currently these are weekly rotations covering US Eastern Time Zone 0000-1200 and 1200-0000 - exact shift schedules may be subject to change in future, but currently we expect you to be on call for 1 week every 4-5 weeks.

Requirements

• At least 7 years of engineering experience, with 5+ years focused on tackling the reliability challenges of large-scale deployments and high-traffic, distributed systems
• Experience with production troubleshooting, including: distributed systems, code, storage, networking, and operating systems
• 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.
• Experience configuring and troubleshooting Linux and NGiNX
• Strong organizational skills, you have an eye for detail and are not afraid to use it!
• Effective project management skills; you have successfully launched projects from inception to production
• Strong communication skills: You clearly articulate, in verbal and written communication, your recommendations and decisions
• Comfortable providing feedback to an array of stakeholders, both internal and external
• Experience with email infrastructure at scale is a plus

Our Hiring Process

Hiring works best when it's a two-way street. That's why we help you get to know us and envision what your future role at DuckDuckGo might look like. Learn more about how we hire -> https://duckduckgo.com/assets/hiring/how_we_hire.pdf

1. Chat With Us. If your application is a good match, our talent manager will invite you to a brief call.
2. Complete Projects. Next, we'll send you a paid test project. Expect a second if all goes well.
3. Meet Our Team. We'll talk between projects so we can learn more about each other.
4. Hop Onboard! If everyone thinks it's a good fit, we'll make you an offer to join.

Benefits

• Remote First, Always: We've always been a fully distributed company with team members all over the world. We trust you to get your work done wherever, and whenever.
• Commitment to Personal Growth: Every team member has an annual budget of $1,250 USD to invest in their professional development. Every team member also has a dedicated Career Advisor, who serves as a guide to help you develop your strengths, identify your motivations, and understand your opportunities for growth.
• Leadership: We have many different types of leaders and possible combinations of leadership roles, so you can grow your career in a way that aligns best with your personal goals. You can seek additional leadership roles by being directly responsible for projects, taking ownership of areas of the company, developing and maintaining internal processes, or pursuing advisory roles.
• Work/Life Balance: Team members have the freedom and flexibility to organize their own work schedules. We want you to thrive both in and out of the office. We trust you to use good judgment and take the time off that you need to bring your best self to work.

We also offer paid parental leave, a co-working stipend, office setup reimbursement, and a wellness stipend. More support resources can be found in our Team Member Support Guide (https://duckduckgo.com/assets/hiring/team_support_guide.pdf), which explains how we make your well-being a priority.