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Salary: USD 178,500 - 178,500 / annual
DuckDuckGo is seeking a Senior Product Design Engineer to join its Design Functional Team. This is a design-first role that bridges product design and engineering, leveraging both coding skills and design expertise to ensure high-quality execution across products like Duck.ai, native apps, and search.
You will work autonomously on highly impactful projects that scale to millions of users, from ideation through execution. Your responsibilities include collaborating with designers and engineers to identify and solve problems, assessing vague problems and proposing high-impact solutions, and ensuring design intent is faithfully executed in code. You'll have a voice in all product-related design decisions and help pioneer new solutions for the privacy layer of the internet.
Key responsibilities:
- Lead design engineering projects end-to-end, assessing problems and executing against success criteria
- Partner with front-end engineers as a peer, demonstrating how to interpret designs and interaction specifications
- Work directly in the codebase to close the gap between intended design and shipped product
- Prototype in code to production standards with understanding of semantic markup and accessibility
- Define requirements and develop tools that accelerate design and engineering workflows
- Structure and maintain design systems with token layering, primitive/semantic naming, and design-to-code parity
- Conduct research and experimentation, leveraging qualitative and quantitative data
- Write creative briefs that clearly communicate project goals, rationale, and success metrics
- Help grow and shape the design engineering discipline as the company's 2nd Design Engineer
Required qualifications:
- 7+ years in product design and/or design engineering roles, including 2+ years in senior-level 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 decisions in PR reviews and contributing code
- Experience defining requirements and developing tools for design and engineering workflows
- Proficiency in prototyping in code with understanding of semantic markup and accessibility
- Fluency in motion and interaction as implemented behavior (easing curves, spring physics, interruptible transitions)
- Experience structuring design systems beyond component inventory
- Proficiency in managing projects of varying complexity with cross-functional collaboration
- Ability to leverage agentic solutions in project management and design execution
- Proficiency in research and experimentation with both qualitative and quantitative data
- Initiative in generating ideas and carrying them forward with urgency and discretion
DuckDuckGo is a profitable, remote-first company of 300+ founded in 2008 with annual revenue exceeding $100m USD. The company offers transparent compensation, paid parental leave, office setup allowances, and co-working allowances. Culture emphasizes trust, inclusivity, and empowered project management with full ownership of projects from scoping through postmortem.
