Principal Engineer, Privacy

The role

You will set technical strategy for how personal data is handled across products, research, and infrastructure. You will architect privacy primitives and lead high-complexity privacy initiatives at the intersection of privacy engineering, distributed systems, and AI safety.

What you will do

• Define and drive technical strategy and architecture for major areas of privacy
• Identify and lead high-complexity, company-critical privacy initiatives
• Architect primitives for data discovery, classification, lineage, access control, audit, retention, deletion, and export
• Turn regulatory, contractual, and consent obligations into technical controls
• Anticipate future AI capabilities, regulation, and customer expectations
• Mentor and develop staff and senior staff engineers
• Raise the bar for privacy design across engineering
• Help hire senior privacy talent
• Represent Anthropic's privacy engineering to customers, regulators, standards bodies, and the research community

Required qualifications

• Track record of operating as a Principal engineer or equivalent
• Deep experience applying privacy engineering principles in production systems
• Experience architecting data governance infrastructure across distributed systems and cloud infrastructure at scale
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar languages
• Understanding of privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA
• Written and verbal communication that builds alignment across engineering, research, legal, and product teams
• Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience
• Field of study relevant to the role as demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience

Nice to have

• Experience building privacy infrastructure or controls for machine learning or AI systems
• Hands-on experience with privacy-enhancing technologies
• Experience establishing or re-architecting a privacy engineering practice
• Experience briefing executives, auditors, regulators, or enterprise customers on privacy risk
• A history of growing engineers into Staff-level and more senior roles
• Contributions to open-source privacy tooling, privacy research, or industry standards

Benefits

• Competitive compensation and benefits
• Optional equity donation matching
• Generous vacation and parental leave
• Flexible working hours
• Office space

Before you apply

• We do sponsor visas, though not for every role or candidate

About the company

Anthropic is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco. Its mission is to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.