Staff Data Privacy & Lifecycle Architect

TikTok USDS Joint Venture; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 198,000 - 416,000; Full time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on Data Privacy and Infrastructure to lead Data Lifecycle Management and Privacy Engineering efforts. You will architect and define roadmaps for data visibility, lineage, and decommissioning across a massive data ecosystem, while guiding PETs integration and automated privacy enforcement.

You will influence cross-functional teams, drive scalable onboarding, and design high-assurance pipelines ensuring data integrity,

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional software development experience in distributed systems.
• Experience designing and operating large-scale data platforms with Hadoop, Spark, or similar tech.
• Strong architectural leadership across cross-functional teams and privacy-by-design initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term technical roadmap for the DLM Platform and PET integration.
• Lead design and scaling of backend services for data retention, archival, and purging across engines (HDFS, ClickHouse, MySQL).
• Create self-service onboarding APIs and tooling to onboard new apps into DLM with cost-consciousness.
• Define migration standards, fallbacks, and rollout strategies for legacy systems into governance pipelines.
• Architect centralized metadata and lineage to enable real-time audits and compliance checks.
• Drive PETs implementation (differential privacy, MPC, etc.) for privacy-preserving analytics.
• Collaborate with Security, Compliance, Legal, and product teams to deliver privacy-by-design APIs.
• Mentor engineers and lead architecture reviews for mission-critical systems.

Skills

Distributed systems

Hive

Spark

Kafka

Kubernetes

Technical leadership

Privacy engineering

Education

CS degree (BSc/MSc/PhD)

Tools

HDFS

ClickHouse

MySQL

Real-time streaming

Job description

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Staff Software Engineer focused on Data Privacy and Infrastructure to lead Data Lifecycle Management and Privacy Engineering efforts. You will architect and define roadmaps for data visibility, lineage, and decommissioning across a massive data ecosystem, while guiding PETs integration and automated privacy enforcement.

You will influence cross-functional teams, drive scalable onboarding, and design high-assurance pipelines ensuring data integrity,