Privacy-Driven Data Governance Engineer

Bison; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 300,000 - 350,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision benefits

Unlimited PTO

Paid parental leave

Relocation support

Job summary

Thinking Machines in San Francisco, CA, is seeking a privacy-focused data governance engineer to shape how data is collected, stored, accessed, kept, and used in training, evaluation, and products. You’ll partner with researchers and product engineers to implement robust privacy controls and measurable safeguards.

This role demands deep privacy expertise and the ability to translate legal obligations into reliable, engineering-driven solutions, balancing privacy with model quality and velocity.

Qualifications

• Built or shipped a privacy or data governance system (retention/deletion pipeline, policy evaluation engine, data cataloging/lineage, consent system, or similar).
• Written and operated production code in Python or an equivalent language with a real system you can walk through.
• Direct experience enforcing privacy or governing data in AI/ML data pipelines (training data, fine-tuning, inference, evaluation).
• Chosen pragmatic controls on real systems and described shipped outcomes.
• Written a technical requirement or control from GDPR/CCPA or similar obligations.

Responsibilities

• Implement and enforce privacy and data governance across internal systems, building tagging, retention, deletion pipelines, and data classifiers.
• Create isolation guarantees to keep customer data separate across training data, interfaces, and conversations.
• Run privacy reviews and threat models for new data sources and features, and ship the control or tooling.
• Translate GDPR/CCPA/contractual obligations into policy-as-code, CI checks, and enforcement pipelines.
• Maintain shared libraries and guardrails to keep the private path as default and fix issues when needed.

Skills

Privacy engineering

Data governance

Python

Threat modeling

Policy-as-code

GDPR/CCPA knowledge

Production code experience

Tools

CI/CD

Data cataloging

Data lineage tooling

Differential privacy

Job description

Thinking Machines in San Francisco, CA, is seeking a privacy-focused data governance engineer to shape how data is collected, stored, accessed, kept, and used in training, evaluation, and products. You’ll partner with researchers and product engineers to implement robust privacy controls and measurable safeguards.

This role demands deep privacy expertise and the ability to translate legal obligations into reliable, engineering-driven solutions, balancing privacy with model quality and velocity.