Backend Software Engineer - Data Retention - TikTok Privacy and Security
TikTok
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Job summary
TikTok is hiring a Backend Software Engineer - Data Retention in San Jose. You will design scalable data lifecycle systems, enforce retention policies, and build deletion pipelines across diverse storage.
Collaborate with privacy, legal, and ML teams to meet GDPR/CCPA and global requirements, delivering auditable and reliable data governance at an exabyte scale. You will work with storage, data, and ML platforms to extend controls to training data and artifacts, ensuring remarkable reliability
Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- 3+ years of backend development experience in Go, Java, C++, or Python.
- Strong background in large-scale distributed systems, databases, messaging and streaming systems.
- Experience with microservices architecture, containers, and cloud platforms.
Responsibilities
- Design and build large-scale data lifecycle management systems that enforce retention policies.
- Build and run high-throughput deletion pipelines with correctness and observability.
- Develop data discovery, metadata collection, and data lineage capabilities.
- Create verification, auditing, and reporting systems proving deletion is complete.
- Support exception workflows with access controls and full audit trails.
- Collaborate with ML, privacy, and legal teams to meet regulations and commitments.
- Shape the roadmap for retention platform and evaluate new techniques.
Skills
Education
Tools
Job description
Location:
San Jose
Employment Type:
Regular
Job Code:
A05652
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The TikTok Privacy and Security (PnS) R&D team creates privacy solutions that are intuitive for users, auditable for regulators, and sustainable for the company, making TikTok a platform where people can safely discover, create, and connect.We build user-facing privacy features, including privacy settings, consent management, data access and export, and age-appropriate experiences. We protect personal data across its full lifecycle, from collection and transfer through access, storage, retention, and deletion. We develop the platforms, technical controls, and governance tools behind privacy protection and regulatory compliance in global markets, and we bring privacy-enhancing technologies and research into production at scale.We tackle challenges unique to operating a platform at global scale: translating rapidly evolving laws and policies into reliable technical controls, providing transparency and auditability across highly complex data systems, supporting different regulatory requirements across regions, and making privacy protection work at the quality and speed production systems demand.You will work across product privacy, data lifecycle management, data protection and residency, privacy engineering platforms, AI governance, and privacy-preserving technologies, using techniques including automated compliance enforcement, data lineage and taxonomy, differential privacy, trusted execution environments, AI fairness, and privacy protection for generative AI. The systems you build will protect hundreds of millions of people, and the privacy decisions you make will reach every one of them.TikTok's Privacy and Security (PNS) Data Retention team makes sure that data across the platform is kept only as long as it is needed, and is then deleted reliably and verifiably. The data covers online services, offline warehouses, logs, backups, and ML training datasets. Global privacy rules keep getting stricter, and the data estate keeps growing to exabyte scale. The team owns the policies, platforms, and technical controls that turn retention commitments into guarantees we can enforce and audit.As a Backend Engineer - Data Retention, you will design and build scalable, reliable, high-performance systems that manage the lifecycle of data at TikTok scale. That includes finding and classifying data, applying retention policies, running deletion, and proving that deletion happened. You will turn fast-changing privacy and regulatory requirements into concrete platform capabilities. You will work closely with storage infrastructure, data platform, ML platform, product, privacy, legal, and security teams to ship solutions across thousands of services and storage systems.
- Design and build large-scale data lifecycle management systems that enforce retention policies across heterogeneous storage: RDBMS, KV stores, caches, message queues, data warehouses (Hive/HDFS), object storage, logs, and backups.
- Build and run high-throughput deletion pipelines, such as TTL enforcement, user account deletion propagation, and partition and snapshot expiry. They must be correct, idempotent, and observable, and must not hurt the stability or performance of production systems.
- Build data discovery and inventory capabilities, including metadata collection, data lineage, and classification of personal and sensitive data. These keep retention policies accurately mapped to real storage assets.
- Build verification, auditing, and reporting systems that prove deletion is complete and on time. Provide evidence for internal audits and regulator inquiries.
- Support exception workflows such as legal holds, retention extensions, and policy approvals, with fine-grained access control and full audit trails.
- Work with ML platform teams to extend retention and deletion controls to training datasets, feature stores, and derived artifacts such as embeddings and model checkpoints.
- Work with privacy, legal, and compliance teams so that systems meet applicable regulations (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and other global and regional privacy laws) and TikTok's own data commitments.
- Help shape the technical roadmap for the data retention platform, and find and evaluate new techniques and tools that improve coverage, efficiency, and reliability at scale.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.
- 3+ years of backend development experience in Go, Java, C++, or Python.
- Strong background in large-scale distributed systems, databases, messaging and streaming systems (such as Kafka or Flink), and caching.
- Solid understanding of storage internals and data lifecycle concepts, such as TTL, compaction, partitioning, snapshots and backups, and consistency models.
- Experience building high-throughput batch or streaming data pipelines with strong correctness guarantees (idempotency, retries, exactly-once or at-least-once semantics).
- Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or GCP and experience with Agile development and DevOps practices.
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, and the ability to work independently and drive cross-team projects across multiple priorities.
- Preferred Qualifications
- 5+ years of industry experience, with significant time on storage infrastructure, data platforms, or privacy and data governance systems.
- Hands-on experience with data retention, data deletion, data inventory and classification, or data lineage systems at large internet scale.
- Familiarity with privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA/CPRA) and industry standards (ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27701, NIST Privacy Framework).
- Experience with big data ecosystems (Hive, Spark, HDFS, Iceberg/Hudi) and their data expiry and deletion mechanisms.
- Familiarity with privacy-enhancing technologies (PII detection, de-identification, pseudonymization, crypto-shredding).
- Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in data governance, privacy engineering, or storage systems.
The base salary range for this position in the selected city is $162000 - $387600 annually.
Compensation may vary outside of this range depending on a number of factors, including a candidate’s qualifications, skills, competencies and experience, and location. Base pay is one part of the Total Package that is provided to compensate and recognize employees for their work, and this role may be eligible for additional discretionary bonuses/incentives, and restricted stock units.
Benefits may vary depending on the nature of employment and the country work location. Employees have day one access to medical, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) savings plan with company match, paid parental leave, short-term and long-term disability coverage, life insurance, wellbeing benefits, among others. Employees also receive 10 paid holidays per year, 10 paid sick days per year and 17 days of Paid Personal Time (prorated upon hire with increasing accruals by tenure).
The Company reserves the right to modify or change these benefits programs at any time, with or without notice.
- Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with all federal, state, and local laws including the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers and the California Fair Chance Act. Our company believes that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:
- Interacting and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external clients and/or colleagues;
- Appropriately handling and managing confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information and access to information technology systems; and
- Exercising sound judgment.
TikTok is the leading destination for short-form mobile video. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. TikTok's global headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we also have offices in New York City, London, Dublin, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo.
Inspiring creativity is at the core of TikTok's mission. Our innovative product is built to help people authentically express themselves, discover and connect – and our global, diverse teams make that possible. Together, we create value for our communities, inspire creativity and bring joy - a mission we work towards every day.
We strive to do great things with great people. We lead with curiosity, humility, and a desire to make impact in a rapidly growing tech company. Every challenge is an opportunity to learn and innovate as one team. We're resilient and embrace challenges as they come. By constantly iterating and fostering an "Always Day 1" mindset, we achieve meaningful breakthroughs for ourselves, our company, and our users. When we create and grow together, the possibilities are limitless. Join us.
TikTok is committed to creating an inclusive space where employees are valued for their skills, experiences, and unique perspectives. Our platform connects people from across the globe and so does our workplace. At TikTok, our mission is to inspire creativity and bring joy. To achieve that goal, we are committed to celebrating our diverse voices and to creating an environment that reflects the many communities we reach. We are passionate about this and hope you are too.
TikTok is committed to providing reasonable accommodations in our recruitment processes for candidates with disabilities, pregnancy, sincerely held religious beliefs or other reasons protected by applicable laws. If you need assistance or a reasonable accommodation, please reach out to us at https://tinyurl.com/RA-request
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