[Hiring] Senior Staff Engineer @Shopify

Role Description

As Senior Staff Engineer on the Privacy Engineering team, you'll define the technical strategy for how Shopify handles privacy at scale. This isn't a role where you execute someone else's roadmap — you identify which problems Shopify needs to solve next, design the systems to solve them, and drive execution across teams and organizational boundaries.

You'll operate across multiple problem spaces simultaneously. You can be parachuted into an unfamiliar area, ramp up on the problem space quickly, and drive results. You don't just champion one project — you shape the technical direction of the entire privacy engineering domain, influencing how other teams across Shopify think about and interact with privacy infrastructure.

The regulatory landscape is changing fast. California's Opt Me Out Act, evolving GPC standards, new data subject request types, and Shopify's expansion into new markets all create problems that don't have established solutions. You'll be the person who sees around corners and builds the infrastructure to handle what's coming — not just what's here today.

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, and the 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, and 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

• Define technical strategy across the privacy domain — Identify the highest-leverage problems, prioritize across competing demands, and set multi-quarter technical direction. Influence the privacy roadmap in partnership with Legal, Compliance, and Data leadership.
• Solve multiple high-value problems in parallel — Ramp up on new problem spaces extremely quickly and drive results. Comfortable switching between redesigning a petabyte-scale redaction pipeline and designing a new consent management architecture in the same week.
• Drive cross-functional, cross-discipline coordination — Build relationships, drive conversations, and ensure Shopify's technical approach serves regulatory and business needs. Create alignment.
• Pull projects out of local maxima — See the better architecture and drive the transition when a team is stuck in an approach that works but doesn't scale.
• Author foundational technical designs — Define system boundaries, data models, and architectural patterns that the team builds on for years.
• Improve the long-term health of privacy infrastructure — Reduce systemic complexity, eliminate operational toil, and build systems that are cheaper, faster, and more reliable over time.
• Set the standard for technical excellence — Your code, reviews, designs, and operational practices are the benchmark.
• Prototype and experiment to solve problems several moves ahead — Build proof of concepts for upcoming legislation and test new features proactively.

Qualifications

• Sees the big picture and the details — Comfortable in strategy meetings and debugging production queries.
• Is self-reliant and does it yourself first — Validates approaches personally before delegating.
• Operates with extreme ownership at organizational scale — Owns outcomes for privacy at Shopify.
• Inspires the team and the area — Attracts talent through the quality of thinking and ambition of work.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals — Writes production-grade code and holds a high bar for system design.
• Proven, hands-on expertise building and optimizing large-scale data processing systems.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and scaling high-throughput, real-time data systems.
• Fluency with AI coding tools as part of daily engineering workflow.
• Track record of cross-functional influence and impact across engineering, legal, compliance, and data platform teams.
• Track record of driving multi-quarter technical strategy across teams.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising the reliability bar across a team.
• Experience and genuine passion for building systems in the privacy domain.

Nice to haves

• Experience with BigQuery, BigTable, Kafka, Flink.
• Experience with system redesigns that fundamentally changed how a domain operates.
• Familiarity with privacy and compliance regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and their technical requirements.
• Experience building in regulated domains where correctness has legal consequences.

Benefits

• 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.