Senior Design Engineer

Your Team and Role

Working on the Design Functional Team, this role is design-first; leveraging your expertise in product design and obsessing over the details to help us maintain a high level of craft across our products, such as Duck.ai , native apps, and search. At DuckDuckGo, Design owns quality end to end, and that's where your engineering skills come in. The unique role you will have leverages your coding skills and engineering knowledge to ensure that the execution of our designs meets our quality bar. You're fluent enough in code to prototype, spec precisely, and partner with engineers as a peer to demonstrate how to interpret our designs and interaction. Your design engineering expertise will close the gap between the design that was intended and the product that actually ships by working directly in the codebase, and with our front-end engineers, to make sure execution clears the bar you set. You'll also be our 2nd Design Engineer at the company, so there are many leadership opportunities to help grow and shape the role and discipline.

As a Senior Design Engineer on the Product Design team you will collaborate with team members at all levels to identify and solve problems across our current product offering, as well as helping to pioneer new solutions as we build out the privacy layer for the Internet. You'll have the opportunity to level up our products through exploring and testing concepts that improve overall experience and increase delight while appealing to a broader audience.

Applying your hands-on design engineering skills, you will autonomously lead highly impactful projects that scale across millions of users . From ideation to execution, you'll assess vague problems, propose high-impact solutions, and execute them against a set of success criteria. You'll have a voice in all product-related design decisions, whether large or small, and an opportunity to work on a team dedicated to our ethical, privacy by design approach. Read more about Design at DuckDuckGo on our blog:

About You

• 7+ years of experience in product design and/or design engineering roles, including 2+ years in senior-level design positions at significant global consumer brands.

• Ability to communicate visual and interaction recommendations with high-quality mockups, prototypes, and rationale.

• Comfortable partnering with engineers as a peer, reasoning about your decisions in PR reviews and contributing code where it's the fastest route to the right result.

• Experience defining requirements and developing tools that help accelerate both design and engineering workflows, and retain both quality and consistency of our design system across design and code.

• An ability to prototype in code to a production standard, with an understanding of semantic markup and accessibility, leveraging but not relying on AI tooling.

• Fluency in motion and interaction as implemented behaviour, not just specified intent; easing curves, spring physics, and interruptible transitions that hold up under real conditions.

• Experience structuring a design system beyond component inventory; token layering, primitive versus semantic naming, and holding parity between design source and code.

• Proficiency in managing projects of varying complexity, from proposal, through execution and release, all while working transparently and collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders and contributors.

• Accustomed to applying agentic solutions into everyday project management and design execution workflows to both accelerate and raise the quality of your work.

• Ability to write creative briefs that clearly define and communicate project goals, rationale, and success metrics with stakeholders.

• Proficiency in research and experimentation. You can leverage both qualitative and quantitative data in driving decisions forward, and are comfortable instrumenting your own work so measurement isn't a hand-off.

• Ability to take initiative in generating ideas and carrying them forward with urgency and discretion, while working openly and collaboratively.

Compensation

$178,500 USD annually and stock options. Compensation is identical within professional levels, regardless of geographic location or team. Compensation for each professional level is transparent across the organization.

Eligibility for company-sponsored health benefits is limited to team members based in the United States. This program does not extend to team members located in other countries, such as Canada or the UK.

Our Team Member Support Guide explains how we prioritize your wellbeing including paid parental leave , office setup , and co-working allowances .