Privacy Engineering Director

Duck Duck Go, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Remote

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Lead privacy engineering initiatives across DuckDuckGo’s products, including private browsing, private search, and agentic computing systems, ensuring technical solutions uphold strict privacy guarantees at scale.
• Own end-to-end delivery of high-complexity, ambiguous, and high-stakes privacy projects—from definition and scoping to execution and postmortem—with full accountability for outcomes.
• Design and implement privacy engineering frameworks tailored to emerging technologies, such as AI-assisted workflows, to address novel data handling challenges in consumer-facing products.
• Evolve and standardize DuckDuckGo’s privacy triage and review processes to improve efficiency, consistency, and scalability across engineering teams.
• Build automation tools and systems that reduce manual toil in privacy compliance reviews, enabling engineers to focus on innovation while maintaining rigorous privacy standards.
• Grow and mentor the next generation of privacy engineers through direct management, hiring, and professional development, fostering a culture of ownership and technical excellence.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, legal, security, and data teams to translate privacy principles into actionable engineering requirements and trade-offs.
• Contribute to company-wide privacy strategy by advising leadership on technical risks, regulatory implications, and emerging threats to user trust and data minimization.
• Drive the adoption of data minimization techniques, anonymization protocols, and privacy-preserving architectures across all product surfaces with a user base exceeding millions.
• Maintain deep technical expertise in audit frameworks, privacy-by-design methodologies, and regulatory landscapes (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) as they apply to software systems.
• Ensure all privacy engineering work aligns with DuckDuckGo’s mission to raise the standard of trust online through transparent, user-centric technical decisions.
• Attend biannual in-person retreats (approximately 4–5 days each) for company all-hands and team gatherings, with travel expectations of at least two trips per year.
• Participate in video-conferenced meetings as required, with no core hours but an expectation of full-time commitment averaging 40 hours per week.
• Uphold DuckDuckGo’s culture of trust, inclusivity, and empowered project management, taking full ownership of projects from inception to impact.

🎯 Requirements

• 10+ years experience leading privacy reviews, audits, or technical privacy programs at a consumer-facing product company with a large (1M+) user base.
• 4+ years privacy engineering leadership experience building infrastructure tools, data minimization systems, or equivalent privacy-preserving technical solutions.
• Director, Head of, or VP-level experience with direct management and hiring responsibilities and meaningful technical scope.
• Proven ability to DRI high-complexity, cross-functional projects with minimal direction.
• Strong communication skills with a track record of translating privacy principles into practical engineering decisions across competing stakeholder needs.
• Experience improving organizational processes by identifying bottlenecks, implementing automation, and building scalable review systems.

🏖️ Benefits

• $243,800 USD annual salary with stock options.
• Transparent compensation identical within professional levels regardless of geographic location.
• Paid parental leave, office setup allowances, and co-working stipends as outlined in the Team Member Support Guide.
• Eligibility for company-sponsored health benefits limited to team members based in the United States.
• Flexible work arrangement with no core hours and full remote-first support.
• Two annual in-person retreats (4–5 days each) for team and company-wide connection.

Skills & Technologies

iOS

Android

Remote

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Duck Duck Go, Inc.

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About Duck Duck Go, Inc.

Internet search engine company founded in 2008 that emphasizes user privacy by not tracking search histories or creating personal profiles. Offers web search, mobile browsers, browser extensions, email protection and other privacy tools designed to block trackers and encrypt connections. Generates revenue through contextual advertising based on keywords rather than personal data. Headquartered in Paoli, Pennsylvania, the company operates as a privately held corporation focused on providing alternatives to data-driven search platforms.

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