Principal Data Protection Engineer, Equinix
CA$131-181k
Employees are eligible for bonus
Digital infrastructure company
Be an early applicant
Digital infrastructure company
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
CA$131-181k
Employees are eligible for bonus
1001+ employees
Company mission
To provide finance, manufacturing, transport, government, and healthcare organizations a cloud-first world.
Role
Who you are
- The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader with deep expertise in data protection, privacy engineering, and secure data architecture, combined with strong software development skills and a forward-looking mindset around AI, agentic agents, and autonomous systems
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Security, or a related field
- 10+ years of hands-on experience across data protection, security engineering, or privacy engineering
- Deep understanding of data protection technologies and practices, including encryption, key management, data classification, tokenization, anonymization, and access control
- Strong experience designing and delivering RESTful (and/or gRPC) APIs, including containerization, API gateways, service orchestration, and platform components
- Advanced programming expertise in Python and Go (additional languages are a plus)
- Experience performing threat modeling, data risk analysis, and privacy impact assessments
- Real-world experience with CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions)
- Experience deploying and operating services on public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) using Docker and Kubernetes
- Exposure to data analysis, machine learning, or AI systems, particularly where sensitive or regulated data is involved
- Be relentlessly driven, pragmatic, and outcome-focused
- Demonstrate a strong backbone—willing to challenge assumptions and raise the bar on data protection
- Exhibit high curiosity and stay current with privacy, data security, AI, and agentic system trends
- Show pride of ownership and strive for technical and operational excellence
- Thrive in a fast-paced, diverse, and constantly evolving environment
- Enjoy learning and applying new technologies and paradigms
What the job involves
- The Digital Information Security Engineering team is seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Protection Engineer to lead the design, development, and automation of data protection capabilities embedded across enterprise platforms and services
- This role focuses on protecting sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, enabling privacy-by-design architectures, and building developer-first APIs and AI-enabled solutions that integrate seamlessly into modern engineering workflows
- Data Protection & Privacy Engineering
- Design and implement data protection controls across data ingress, processing, storage, inference, and egress layers (e.g., classification, tokenization, encryption, masking, policy enforcement)
- Define and operationalize privacy-by-design and secure-by-default patterns for platforms, APIs, and AI-driven systems
- Evaluate and implement data governance, consent, residency, retention, and deletion mechanisms aligned with regulatory and enterprise requirements
- Analyze and assess data flows to identify privacy risks, data exposure paths, and compliance gaps
- API & Platform Engineering
- Design, develop, and deliver high-quality, production-grade APIs that expose data protection and privacy capabilities as reusable services
- Own the API layer design, including authentication, authorization, schema design, rate limiting, observability, and security controls
- Research, select, and implement technologies for API gateways, service orchestration, and platform integration
- Ensure APIs meet published SLAs and SLOs, with built-in instrumentation and monitoring
- Software Development & Automation
- Develop core services, tooling, and automation primarily using Python and Go (Golang)
- Build integrations, hooks, plugins, and pipelines that leverage data from security, privacy, and AI platforms
- Automate data protection workflows across CI/CD pipelines and cloud platforms
- Perform rigorous testing and validation to ensure reliability, scalability, and performance
- AI, Agentic Systems & Emerging Technologies
- Evaluate and integrate AI and open-source technologies to enhance data protection, detection, and enforcement
- Design or contribute to agentic agents and autonomous workflows that make context-aware decisions about data use, access, and policy enforcement
- Partner with AI platform teams to address data protection challenges in model training, fine-tuning, inference, and RAG systems
- Research emerging trends in AI safety, privacy-preserving ML, and secure data sharing
- Technical Leadership & Delivery
- Collaborate closely with Product Management and cross-functional engineering teams to translate requirements into technical solutions
- Anticipate architectural and delivery risks; proactively resolve or escalate technical roadblocks
- Own technical implementation end-to-end from design through production and operations
- Operate, support, and continuously improve data protection services in live environments
- Leadership Characteristics
- Is a transformational leader who excels at driving bold and meaningful change at scale and across multiple dimensions
- Leads with a global mindset, across cultures, in a highly matrixed, relationship and consensus-driven environment
- Cultivates Innovation – ability to foresee potential security challenges and trends in the industry, and to develop strategies to address them
Our take
Equinix is a veteran player in the digital infrastructure market, connecting industry-leading organizations in finance, manufacturing, retail, transportation, government, healthcare, and education.
The company provides a range of services within the categories of digital, support, data center, and interconnection, with capabilities including, for example, simplifying hybrid cloud deployments or securing on-site deployments. It has an extensive range of partners, granting its clients access to a vast range of industry-leading technologies atop its own offerings.
With a wide global presence, Equinix has secured a path to continued success by its ability to keep abreast of developments in the space. The company is comfortably positioned to remain a robust and leading player across multiple growth avenues and can be expected to make more smart developments and partnerships in the future.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
9% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Company HQ
Redwood Shores, Redwood City, CA
Leadership
Adaire Fox-Martin
(CEO & President)Prior to becoming CEO of Equinix in 2024, Adaire spent nearly 3 years at Google in various roles, including Head of Google Ireland and President of Google Cloud Go to Market. She also spent nearly 14 years at SAP and over 18 years at Oracle Corporation.
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