Senior Privacy Engineer

Shopify powers millions of entrepreneurs around the world. Behind that scale is a massive amount of data;merchant data, customer data, and partner data. Our Privacy Compliance Engineers make sure that data stays private, protected, and compliant with the regulations that govern it.

This is not a traditional security engineering role. You won't be hunting software bugs. You'll be hunting privacy problems — reviewing technical designs before they ship, assessing existing controls against CCPA, GDPR, and our own internal standards, and building the internal tooling that helps the team do that work at scale. You'll collaborate daily with Legal, Product, Data, and Engineering teams across Shopify, and you'll be expected to hold your own in those rooms.

The work is broad. One day you're auditing how a machine learning pipeline handles personal data. The next you're reviewing a PR, fixing something that broke in a tool you helped build, or working through a novel privacy question with Legal that nobody has a clean answer to yet.

Responsibilities

• Reviewing technical designs for privacy risk across merchant, customer, partner, and employee data

• Assessing existing controls for compliance with CCPA, GDPR, and Shopify's internal privacy policies

• Building and maintaining internal tooling that automate and support the compliance program; this team ships software

• Reviewing PRs and providing engineering support to keep internal tools running

• Partnering with Legal Privacy, Data, Product, and Engineering teams to surface and prioritize privacy risk

• Applying your understanding of cryptography, hashing, encryption, and large-scale data infrastructure to evaluate whether the right mechanisms are in place and configured correctly

Qualifications

• You're an experienced developer who genuinely has an interest in protecting privacy and wants to innovate on the right approaches

• You understand how encryption, hashing, and salting work and why the implementation details matter for privacy guarantees

• You have a working understanding of how AI and machine learning systems interact with personal data; and you see that as an interesting problem, not an impossible one

• You're comfortable with AI-assisted development; we use it here and we expect you to use it too

• You can read a codebase, write code when needed, and build internal tooling from the ground up

• You've worked with large-scale data infrastructure before — either on the engineering or the privacy side