Senior Backend Engineer

pofft Technology Inc.; Willistown Township (PA); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

DuckDuckGo is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to own backend projects across the privacy-focused search platform. You’ll work remotely, writing Perl, Go, and Node.js, delivering scalable, testable services and improving data pipelines to keep the search relevant.

You’ll mentor engineers, influence architectural decisions, and collaborate with cross-functional teams to balance user impact with technical tradeoffs. Prior experience with AI tooling and a strong product mindset are valued.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional backend experience
• Product acumen to reason about technical tradeoffs
• Familiarity with AI agent tooling and prompt engineering
• Understanding of complex data structures and algorithms
• Data-driven analytical skills for decision-making and experimentation
• Strong project management abilities
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Experience mentoring engineers and supporting career growth

Responsibilities

• Lead backend projects on the DuckDuckGo platform
• Mentor and grow the Backend Team over time
• Develop scalable, testsable backend services using Perl, Go and Node.js
• Collaborate remotely with peers to solve product issues
• Implement AI-assisted features and data processing pipelines to maintain search relevance
• Contribute to privacy-focused architecture and engineering principles

Skills

Product acumen

Data-driven decision making

Project management

Excellent communication

Mentoring

Tools

Perl

Go

Node.js

Job description

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!

Your Team and Role

Working on the Backend Functional Team, you'll lead complex projects across key company-wide objectives. Using Perl (Version 5), Go, and Node.js, you’ll write pragmatic, performant, testable code that works consistently, and work on related projects. Recent projects include:

Implementing AI-assisted answers and integrating them into our Search product while maintaining our privacy-first approach

Delivering improvements to Duck.ai to help us make it a competitive AI chat alternative for both free and paying users

Implementing sophisticated data processing pipelines that maintain search relevancy

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you'll collaborate remotely with your peers and take responsibility for solving product issues impacting our all-in-one privacy solution, whether large or small. In time, you'll formally mentor other engineers, supporting their career growth and the growth of the Backend Team at DuckDuckGo.

About You

7+ years of professional experience, primarily focused on backend systems that power consumer-facing products

Product acumen to reason about technical tradeoffs in terms of user impact

Familiarity with AI agent tooling: evaluation frameworks, RAG pipelines and prompt engineering

A fundamental understanding of complex data structures and algorithms — you can develop and apply new solutions and confidently navigate and improve existing code.

Data-driven analytical skills for decision-making, stakeholder alignment, and experiment-oriented delivery

Solid project management abilities

Excellent written and verbal communication to validate and articulate decisions

Previous experience leading and mentoring experienced engineers, supporting their career goals, and unlocking their potential.

Compensation

This role is paid on a regional pay scale, in local currency, and stock options:

United States...

Payment Type

-

Price Range

-

Work Type

Full-Time

Location

Anywhere in the World