Staff Software Engineer — Privacy-Driven Data Lifecycle

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k) match

Parental leave

Disability insurance

Life insurance

Wellbeing benefits

Paid holidays

Paid sick days

Paid personal time

Job summary

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Data Privacy & Infrastructure, shaping the data lifecycle management and privacy tooling roadmap at petabyte scale. You will architect end-to-end privacy controls, lineage, and secure data deletion mechanisms across diverse storage engines.

You will drive cross-functional programs with Security, Compliance, Legal, and product teams, and mentor senior engineers while advancing a Privacy-as-Code paradigm within a

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science or a related field.
• Industry Experience: 5+ years of professional software development experience in large-scale distributed systems.
• Big Data & Infrastructure: Strong experience in high-volume data ecosystems (Hive, Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes).
• Technical Leadership: Led complex, multi-quarter projects across teams and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership & Vision: Define architectural blueprint and long-term roadmap for the DLM Platform and PET integration.
• DLM Platform Architecture: Design and scale high-throughput, fault-tolerant backend services for data retention, archival, and purging across engines (HDFS, ClickHouse, MySQL).
• Federated Onboarding & FinOps: Architect self-service onboarding APIs and tools, optimize cost-of-compliance.
• Risk-Mitigated Migrations: Define standards and rollout strategies to migrate legacy systems into governance pipelines without breaking production SLAs.
• Enterprise Metadata & Lineage: Develop scalable metadata repository for real-time audits and compliance checks.
• PETs Implementation: Build cryptographic/privacy frameworks to protect user identity in analytics pipelines.
• Technical Influence & Collaboration: Partner with Security, Compliance, Legal, and product teams on privacy-by-design APIs.
• Mentorship & Culture: Mentor engineers and lead architecture reviews for critical systems.

Skills

Distributed systems

Big data

Hive

Spark

Kafka

Kubernetes

Technical leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

HDFS

ClickHouse

MySQL

Job description

TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Data Privacy & Infrastructure, shaping the data lifecycle management and privacy tooling roadmap at petabyte scale. You will architect end-to-end privacy controls, lineage, and secure data deletion mechanisms across diverse storage engines.

You will drive cross-functional programs with Security, Compliance, Legal, and product teams, and mentor senior engineers while advancing a Privacy-as-Code paradigm within a