Data Retention Backend Engineer

TikTok; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 388,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) plan

Parental leave

Disability coverage

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Paid sick days

Paid personal time

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

Backend languages

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

Microservices

Cloud platforms

DevOps practices

Storage internals

Communication skills

Education

CS degree

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Kafka

Flink

Hive

HDFS

Job description

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