About this role
What you'll work on:
Expect to work across the full breadth of the product rather than one slice of it.
- New consumer products that extend Startpage beyond the search box, on desktop and on the web
- The search results page itself: new features for subscribers and for everyone, within the constraints of our search partnerships
- Real-time decisioning that shapes what a user sees for a given query
- The homepage and engagement features that bring people back
- Traffic quality and abuse prevention for a product that attracts automated traffic
- Data instrumentation and reporting so the team can see what is working
Responsibilities:
- Design, build and ship features end to end, from API and data model through to the UI
- Drive your work with AI coding agents: give them the tools, context and guardrails they need, run them in loops against a spec, orchestrate several agents in parallel on one problem, and review what they produce with a critical eye
- Turn interactive prototypes from product into production code, keeping the intent and cutting what does not hold up
- Own services in production on Kubernetes: deploys, monitoring, the on-call rotation, and the latency and uptime targets a search product demands
- Shape architecture decisions and lead tech-debt reduction so the codebase stays fast to change
- Protect user privacy in every design decision: no tracking, minimal data retention, and no third-party calls that leak queries
- Write automated tests as a matter of course
- Instrument features and read your own results in Sigma and Snowflake; propose the next iteration from the data
- Work with outside partners and agencies so web and app experiences stay consistent
- Write clear tickets, PRs and design notes; review teammates' work the same day
Requirements:
- Daily, hands-on use of agentic coding tools: you can run agents in loops, write the evals that keep them honest, coordinate multi-agent workflows, and know when to take the keyboard back
- 5+ years of professional web development, owning both frontend and backend in production
- Strong Python, plus JavaScript or TypeScript, React, and modern CSS and HTML
- Hands-on with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and Redis
- CI/CD and monitoring tooling, and AWS or a comparable cloud platform; comfortable being paged for what you ship
- Solid automated testing habits
- SQL fluency and the habit of checking your own feature's numbers after launch
- Care for performance: you know what a 100 ms regression costs on a search results page
- Clear written communication with a distributed team and outside vendors
Nice to have:
- Desktop browser or mobile app experience, especially Chromium, Electron or a shipped native app
- Prior search or privacy product experience
- Ads or recommendations systems, especially serving ML models at low latency
- Bot detection, fraud or abuse prevention
- SEO-driven site generation at scale
- Familiarity with EU privacy regulation
How we work:
- Small North America-based team, weekly releases
- Product work starts as a clickable prototype; engineers are expected to push back on it before building
- Agents do the typing; engineers own the architecture, the review and the outcome
- Data over opinion: every feature ships with instrumentation and a success metric
- Jira for tracking, GitHub for code, Sigma and Snowflake for analytics, Slack for the day to day