[Hiring] Senior Engineer - Privacy Engineering @Shopify

Role Description

As a Senior Engineer on the Privacy Engineering team, you'll work on systems that directly protect the privacy rights of millions of merchants and their customers. The work is technically challenging — solving ambiguous problems across multiple systems where correctness has legal consequences. It's operationally demanding (on-call, incident response, compliance deadlines) and genuinely impactful (the systems you build have real legal and human consequences if they fail).

Privacy Engineering is the team that makes privacy work at scale — not as a policy checkbox, but as real infrastructure. We build and own the systems that let Shopify reliably handle millions of data subject requests across every surface of the platform:

• DSAR orchestration
• PII redaction
• Compliance tooling
• Event pipelines that enforce privacy by default

When a merchant, or their customer requests their data be deleted, when someone opts out of data sale, or when a regulatory deadline hits — our systems are what make it happen. The problems are genuinely hard, the consequences are real, and the work has direct visibility into Shopify's company priorities.

We sit at the intersection of engineering, data, and compliance, coordinating across:

• Identity
• Data Platform
• Data Governance
• Streaming Platform
• Legal

This is a team that ships. We bias toward action, iterate quickly, and trust each other to own outcomes. We use AI tools extensively — Claude Code and Pi are part of our daily workflow for code generation, context gathering, PR reviews, and system investigation.

What you'll do:

• Build and improve privacy processing systems — Design, implement, and operate the systems that process erasure requests, opt-outs, access requests, and objections across Shopify's platform. You’ll work in Ruby/Rails, BigQuery, BigTable, Kafka, and Terraform.
• Own problems end-to-end — From identifying the issue, through design and implementation, to production deployment and operational monitoring.
• Write tech designs — Document the problem, approach, trade-offs, and plan when a feature or system change requires design thinking.
• Drive projects to completion — Champion or contribute to projects that ship on time. Break down ambiguous problems into well-scoped issues.
• Operate what you build — Participate in on-call rotations, respond to incidents, and build observability and alerting.
• Raise the bar for the team — Conduct thorough code reviews, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and proactive improvements to the codebase.
• Navigate cross-team dependencies — Work with Identity, Data Platform, Data Governance, Legal, and Compliance to drive alignment and ship solutions.

Qualifications

• Solves ambiguous problems with deep understanding of dependencies.
• Ships incrementally and biases toward action.
• Writes code that others can understand, operate, and maintain.
• Exhibits good judgment in decision-making.
• Takes operational responsibility for systems built.
• Is reliable, communicative, and collaborative.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals — you've built, scaled, and operated web applications in production.
• Extreme ownership — you see problems through to full resolution.
• Openness to working in a Ruby/Rails codebase.
• Genuine curiosity about the privacy domain.
• Fluency with AI coding tools as part of your daily workflow.

Nice to haves

• Experience with privacy/compliance systems, GDPR/CCPA, or data subject request processing.
• Experience with BigQuery, BigTable, or large-scale data processing.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka).
• Previous work in regulated domains where correctness has legal consequences.

Company Description

At Shopify, we pride ourselves on moving quickly—not just in shipping, but in our hiring process as well. If you're ready to apply, please be prepared to interview with us within the week. Our goal is to complete the entire interview loop within 30 days. You will be expected to complete a live pair programming session, come prepared with your own IDE.