Senior Business Development Manager (Remote within USA or Canada)

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.

About the Role

As a Senior Business Development Manager on the Partnerships team, you’ll lead DuckDuckGo’s most complex Product partnerships and drive strategy — sourcing, negotiating, and scaling high-impact deals with partners that can materially enhance our entire portfolio of products (search, Duck.ai, Privacy Pro subscriptions, etc) and work on related projects. Many of these partnerships will be the first-of-their-kind where you will have to create playbooks from 0-to-1 — you'll be structuring deals where the product, economics, and strategic value need to be figured out together, and you’ll be working cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and Finance to make them real. You'll manage a portfolio of competing and complementary partner relationships, forging partnerships with leading organizations while, in the case of AI, navigating the strategic tradeoffs of a market where pricing, capabilities, and competitive dynamics shift quarterly. Your work will directly shape how our products evolve, including Duck.ai and Assist, and reach millions of users.

Projects

• Figuring out further partnerships that could enhance our Duck.ai and Search Assist offerings
• Identifying opportunities for Partnerships to drive product enhancement and user engagement/retention
• Creating new distribution channels to help grow our AI related services

Requirements

• 10+ years of Business Development, Partnerships, or Strategic Partnerships experience
• 2+ years of cross-functional leadership on partnership projects and teams, including legal and engineering
• Experience with consumer internet or user-facing software business with an understanding of the AI/LLM ecosystem and how AI capabilities are being integrated into consumer products
• Significant experience leading complex product partnerships end-to-end — from identifying the opportunity through deal close and beyond. These should be partnerships where you've created something new together and navigated real product and technical complexity, not sales deals or API licensing
• Self-sufficiency on the commercial details — you don’t wait for someone else to draft terms, build financial models, or pressure-test deal structures — you can handle these details on your own while partnering with Legal and Finance
• Experience managing a portfolio of complex strategic partner relationships and an understanding of the tradeoffs that come with balancing competing and complementary providers
• You build trust quickly with internal teams, partners, and stakeholders you've never worked with before. You're collaborative by default and decisive when it counts
• Located in US or Canada

Pay

$200,267 USD annually 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.

Benefits

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.

Schedule

• Remote-first with no core hours, expecting an average full-time commitment of 40 hours per week
• 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