Backend Engineer, Data Retention at Scale

TikTok; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 207,000 - 368,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok is seeking a Software Engineer - AI Governance in Seattle to help design and build backend data-retention systems at scale. You will work on privacy protections, governance tooling, and regulatory compliance across global data assets.

You will collaborate with privacy, legal, data platform, ML, and product teams to translate evolving regulations into reliable platform capabilities, with strong emphasis on auditability and security.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• Strong background in large-scale distributed systems, databases, messaging and streaming systems, and caching.
• Experience building high-throughput batch or streaming data pipelines with correctness guarantees.
• Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with Agile development and DevOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Design and build large-scale data lifecycle management systems enforcing retention policies across heterogeneous storage (RDBMS, KV stores, caches, queues, Hive/HDFS, object storage).
• Build and run high-throughput deletion pipelines with TTL enforcement and data deletion propagation.
• Develop data discovery, lineage, and classification capabilities for retention mappings.
• Create verification, auditing, and reporting systems to prove deletion is complete and on time.
• Support exception workflows like legal holds, retention extensions, and policy approvals with full audit trails.
• Collaborate with ML platform teams to extend retention controls to training datasets and model artifacts.
• Work with privacy, legal, and compliance teams to meet GDPR, CCPA/CPRA and TikTok commitments.
• Shape the technical roadmap for the data retention platform and evaluate new techniques for scale.

Skills

Distributed systems

Caching

Agile DevOps

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

Flink

Hive

Spark

HDFS

Iceberg

Hudi

Job description

TikTok is seeking a Software Engineer - AI Governance in Seattle to help design and build backend data-retention systems at scale. You will work on privacy protections, governance tooling, and regulatory compliance across global data assets.

You will collaborate with privacy, legal, data platform, ML, and product teams to translate evolving regulations into reliable platform capabilities, with strong emphasis on auditability and security.