Principal Data Protection Engineer

About the role

The Digital Information Security Engineering team is seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Protection Engineer to lead the design, development, and automation of data protection capabilities embedded across enterprise platforms and services. This role focuses on protecting sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, enabling privacy-by-design architectures, and building developer-first APIs and AI-enabled solutions that integrate seamlessly into modern engineering workflows.

Responsibilities

• Data Protection & Privacy Engineering:
  • Design and implement data protection controls across data ingress, processing, storage, inference, and egress layers (e.g., classification, tokenization, encryption, masking, policy enforcement)
  • Define and operationalize privacy-by-design and secure-by-default patterns for platforms, APIs, and AI-driven systems
  • Evaluate and implement data governance, consent, residency, retention, and deletion mechanisms aligned with regulatory and enterprise requirements
  • Analyze and assess data flows to identify privacy risks, data exposure paths, and compliance gaps
• API & Platform Engineering:
  • Design, develop, and deliver high-quality, production-grade APIs that expose data protection and privacy capabilities as reusable services
  • Own the API layer design, including authentication, authorization, schema design, rate limiting, observability, and security controls
  • Research, select, and implement technologies for API gateways, service orchestration, and platform integration
  • Ensure APIs meet published SLAs and SLOs, with built-in instrumentation and monitoring
• Software Development & Automation:
  • Develop core services, tooling, and automation primarily using Python and Go (Golang)
  • Build integrations, hooks, plugins, and pipelines that leverage data from security, privacy, and AI platforms
  • Automate data protection workflows across CI/CD pipelines and cloud platforms
  • Perform rigorous testing and validation to ensure reliability, scalability, and performance
• AI, Agentic Systems & Emerging Technologies:
  • Evaluate and integrate AI and open-source technologies to enhance data protection, detection, and enforcement
  • Design or contribute to agentic agents and autonomous workflows that make context-aware decisions about data use, access, and policy enforcement
  • Partner with AI platform teams to address data protection challenges in model training, fine-tuning, inference, and RAG systems
  • Research emerging trends in AI safety, privacy-preserving ML, and secure data sharing
• Technical Leadership & Delivery:
  • Collaborate closely with Product Management and cross-functional engineering teams to translate requirements into technical solutions
  • Anticipate architectural and delivery risks; proactively resolve or escalate technical roadblocks
  • Own technical implementation end-to-end from design through production and operations
  • Operate, support, and continuously improve data protection services in live environments

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Security, or a related field
• 10+ years of hands-on experience across data protection, security engineering, or privacy engineering
• Deep understanding of data protection technologies and practices, including encryption, key management, data classification, tokenization, anonymization, and access control
• Strong experience designing and delivering RESTful (and/or gRPC) APIs, including containerization, API gateways, service orchestration, and platform components
• Advanced programming expertise in Python and Go (additional languages are a plus)
• Experience performing threat modeling, data risk analysis, and privacy impact assessments
• Real-world experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions)
• Experience deploying and operating services on public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) using Docker and Kubernetes
• Exposure to data analysis, machine learning, or AI systems, particularly where sensitive or regulated data is involved

Pay

The targeted pay range for this position in the United States is $155,000 - $233,000 USD / Annual