Director, Site Reliability Engineering

📋 Job Overview

Hi, we're DuckDuckGo, the online protection company and remote-first team of 300+ on a mission to raise the standard of trust online. Founded in 2008 and profitable since 2014, annual revenue now exceeds $100m USD and millions use our browser on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, our search engine, and the DuckDuckGo subscription. We also offer private, useful, and optional AI, including Duck.ai, which lets you chat privately with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AIs, all in one place. Our culture of trust, inclusivity, and empowered project management underpins everything we do, where each team member takes full ownership of their projects, from scoping and execution to postmortem. If you're seeking end-to-end ownership of your work, you've come to the right place!

🏢 About DuckDuckGo

Working on the Site Reliability Team, you'll help build and maintain world-class infrastructure to meet the needs of millions of users protecting their privacy online. You'll utilize high-level languages like Perl, Go, TypeScript, or Python and work on related projects. Recent projects include:

• Ensuring our Duck.ai product meets our reliability standards and minimizing user friction on failures
• Scaling up our own index infrastructure to handle billions of documents
• Create anti fraud verifications that respect users privacy

🎯 The Role

As Director, Site Reliability Engineering, you'll dive deep into complex operational challenges, including software, systems, automation, and process analysis. We are looking for candidates who can read, write, troubleshoot, and deploy all types of software to help us tackle the reliability challenges of large-scale deployments.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Lead and collaborate on high-impact and complex projects from proposal through postmortem
• Propose innovative solutions to vague problems and execute them with a strong focus on metrics
• Develop effective tools, services, alerts, and responses to identify and address reliability risks
• Investigate and root-cause sources of instability in high-traffic, distributed systems
• Implement automation around infrastructure provisioning and configuration management to prioritize efficiency, scalability, and reliability
• Help identify the future technical direction of our deployment with the goal of improving reliability and performance
• Partner closely with software engineers to triage production issues and identify appropriate remediation
• Leverage cloud-native services and architectures to enhance reliability and scalability

📌 Required Qualifications

• 10+ years relevant professional experience in reliability, platform, infrastructure, or software engineering, including 4+ years leading SRE teams
• Experience participating in a 24x7 on-call rotation for a large-scale deployment
• Ability to lead and collaborate on high-impact and complex projects from proposal through postmortem
• Proficient in AI-driven development, including designing and implementing agentic workflows
• Skills to wrangle vague problems, propose innovative solutions, and execute them with a strong focus on metrics
• Experience developing effective tools, services, alerts, and responses to identify and address reliability risks
• Investigative ability to root-cause sources of instability in high-traffic, distributed systems
• Deep experience administering and troubleshooting Linux and web technologies
• Ability to implement automation around infrastructure provisioning and configuration management to prioritize efficiency, scalability, and reliability
• Foresight to help identify the future technical direction of our deployment with the goal of improving reliability and performance
• Advanced programming skills enabling close partnership with software engineers to triage production issues and identify appropriate remediation
• Ability to leverage cloud-native services and architectures to enhance reliability and scalability, with hands-on experience packaging and deploying applications using Docker and Docker Compose

🎁 Benefits

Annual Compensation: $243,800 USD and stock options. Compensation is transparent across the organization, and all team members within the same professional level and global region receive the same compensation. 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.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Everyone within the same professional level and global region earns the same compensation, regardless of their functional team, location, gender, educational background, or years of experience. You’ll be required to attend meetings on camera via video conferencing. Expect to travel at least two times a year: once for our all-hands meetup and again for a team retreat (each around 4-5 days). While extenuating circumstances may impact attendance, everyone is strongly encouraged to attend.