About the role
About the team
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.
About the role
As a Senior Engineer on this 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).
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. We don't throw things over the wall.
Write tech designs — When a feature or system change requires design thinking, document the problem, approach, trade-offs, and plan. Drive the design to alignment with stakeholders.
Drive projects to completion — Champion or contribute to projects that ship on time. Break down ambiguous problems into well-scoped issues. Communicate progress clearly.
Operate what you build — Participate in on-call rotations. Respond to incidents. Build observability and alerting so problems are caught before they escalate.
Raise the bar for the team — Thorough code reviews, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and proactive improvements to the codebase. Leave every area of code better than you found it.
Navigate cross-team dependencies — Privacy touches everything. You'll work with Identity, Data Platform, Data Governance, Legal, and Compliance to drive alignment and ship solutions that work across organizational boundaries.
What we're looking for
Solves ambiguous problems with deep understanding of dependencies. You can take a vague problem ("we need stateful GPC processing" or "this redaction pipeline can't handle tables over 4000 partitions") and drive it to a concrete solution — understanding the systems involved, the trade-offs, and the downstream implications.
Ships incrementally. You bias toward action. You ship the smallest valuable thing first, validate it, and iterate. You don't spend weeks investigating before showing progress.
Writes code that others can understand, operate, and maintain. Your PRs are well-structured, your tests are meaningful, and your design decisions are documented. You think about the person who will maintain this code in two years.
Exhibits good judgment. You know when to dig deep and when to move on. You know when to reach out for help and when to figure it out yourself. You know when a 90% solution shipped today is better than a 100% solution shipped next week.
Takes operational responsibility. You don't just build systems — you operate them. You respond to pages, investigate alerts, and care about the health of production systems.
Is reliable, communicative and collaborative. You review code thoroughly, share what you learn, and help your teammates grow.
Requirements
Strong software engineering fundamentals — you've built, scaled, and operated web applications in production and hold a high bar for code quality and system design.
Extreme ownership — you see problems through to full resolution, including cleanup, tech debt, and operational follow-through. Not just the interesting algorithmic core.
Openness to working in a Ruby/Rails codebase — you don't need to know it coming in, but you need to be willing to go deep on it.
Genuine curiosity about the privacy domain — you don't need to be an expert on day one, but you must be deeply interested in solving the technical challenges of this problem space.
Fluency with AI coding tools as part of your daily workflow — you use them to move faster without sacrificing quality, and you review AI-generated output with the same rigor as hand-written code.
Nice to haves
Experience with Ruby/Rails at scale
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