Top Tech Jobs & Startup Jobs in Chicago, IL

As a Senior Backend Engineer at DuckDuckGo, you'll lead backend projects, mentor engineers, and develop AI-enhanced features for the company's privacy-centric product line.

Lead and scale complex product partnerships end-to-end, sourcing, negotiating, and operationalizing strategic deals that enhance DuckDuckGo products (search, Duck.ai, subscriptions). Work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, Legal, and Finance to build first-of-their-kind integrations, create playbooks, manage partner portfolios, and drive distribution and user engagement for AI-related services.

As the Director of Data Science, you'll mentor teams, oversee projects, drive data-driven decisions, and implement AI and ML solutions while enhancing our data pipeline.

Own web compatibility triage and incident response across DuckDuckGo browsers on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android. Debug complex web applications and third-party code, distinguish site, browser, and privacy-related issues, reverse-engineer obfuscated code, build durable cross-platform fixes, and develop automation and LLM agent tooling to reproduce and triage breakage. Lead ambiguous projects independently and communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Lead and own major components of DuckDuckGo's privacy technology using Go, Node.js, Python, and Perl. Design and implement privacy features, improve search and AI features without compromising privacy, build tracker-detection features, participate in privacy reviews and audits, and mentor engineers over time.

Own and scale DuckDuckGo’s design system across products and platforms. Responsibilities include auditing the existing system, defining its roadmap, leading design system projects, creating tokens and libraries, bridging design and engineering workflows, documenting recommendations, and delivering high-quality mockups and prototypes. The role requires autonomous leadership, strong communication, comfort with ambiguity, and use of AI-driven solutions to improve design system management.

Serve as DuckDuckGo's senior legal leader and strategic advisor, overseeing global privacy, regulatory and competition matters, managing the legal team, directing outside counsel, supporting corporate governance, M&A and financing, and partnering with Product, Engineering, and Policy on AI, data practices, and new product launches.

Drive profitable acquisition and growth of paid subscribers through paid advertising, channel and creative testing, conversion optimization, experimentation, and subscription economics analysis. The role owns marketing campaigns end to end, partners with Product and Engineering on funnels and instrumentation, and scales subscription programs using aggregate measurement and privacy-respecting advertising practices.

Lead high-complexity data science initiatives improving search ranking, retrieval, relevance, and evaluation. Develop and deploy production machine-learning and NLP solutions, investigate LLM-based ranking features, optimize SQL queries, and work with sparse privacy-preserving data. Define strategies for ambiguous problems, guide other data scientists, collaborate with product teams, and own projects from scoping through production.

Lead and scale a profitable paid app subscription acquisition program. Own KPI development, campaign strategy, budget allocation, measurement frameworks, experimentation, and cross-functional roadmapping. Drive integrated paid campaigns, rapid testing, and alignment across marketing, product, design, data science, and finance to grow subscribers while preserving privacy-respecting practices.