Principal Data Security Architect, Equinix
CA$131-181k
+ Bonus
AWS
GCP
Python
Azure
REST API
Expert level
Toronto
Digital infrastructure company
Job no longer available
Digital infrastructure company
1001+ employees
B2BCommunicationSaaSCloud Computing
Job no longer available
CA$131-181k
+ Bonus
AWS
GCP
Python
Azure
REST API
Expert level
Toronto
1001+ employees
B2BCommunicationSaaSCloud Computing
Company mission
To provide finance, manufacturing, transport, government, and healthcare organizations a cloud-first world.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Security, or a related field — or equivalent demonstrated experience
- 10–15+ years in data protection or security engineering, including significant time operating at a senior, staff, or principal level
- Deep, hands-on architecture and engineering experience across CASB (inline and API modes), DSPM, eDLP, Exact Data Match (EDM), and Indexed Document Matching (IDM)
- Proven ability to design and operate data protection controls at enterprise scale
- Strong command of data classification and content inspection, data exfiltration vectors and prevention techniques, and SaaS/cloud data security risks
- Expertise implementing Zero Trust data protection strategies
- Demonstrated ability to make and defend architectural trade-offs across security, usability, cost, and operability
- Strong programming/scripting skills (Python preferred) applied to real automation and integration work
- Hands-on experience with REST APIs and security integrations, SIEM/SOAR platforms, and cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Strong understanding of identity, access control, and conditional access models
- Be deeply hands-on — an architect who still builds, not only advises
- Take a data-first approach to security, focused on measurable risk reduction
- Demonstrate elite analytical and tuning expertise, especially with EDM/IDM
- Influence and elevate senior engineers and cross-functional partners without formal authority
- Be proactive, curious, and relentless about improving data protection coverage and accuracy
- Thrive in a fast-paced, diverse, and constantly evolving environment
- This role requires evidence of real, production-grade work — not theoretical familiarity or vendor exposure alone. Candidates should be prepared to walk through, in concrete technical detail:
- Specific enterprise data protection solutions they personally architected and implemented — not merely oversaw or advised on
- The concrete business and security problem being solved, the real-world constraints, and why the chosen approach won over the alternatives considered
- How they built, scaled, and maintained EDM/IDM detection in production and measurably improved accuracy over time
- How their designs reduced actual risk, supported by metrics and outcomes
- Missteps or failed approaches and what they changed as a result
What the job involves
- The Digital Information Security Engineering team is seeking a Principal Data Security Architect to define, design, and influence the enterprise's most complex data protection capabilities across SaaS, web, endpoint, and cloud environments
- This is an individual-contributor role for data-centric security — a hands-on technical leader who sets architectural direction, builds reference implementations, and solves the hardest data protection problems at enterprise scale
- The ideal candidate will focus on protecting sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, enabling privacy-by-design architecture, the end-to-end technical design for CASB, DSPM, eDLP, advanced content detection (EDM/IDM), secure file sharing, and translate those capabilities into durable, measurable risk reduction.
- Beyond engineering, the role shapes enterprise data governance strategy and partners closely with the Data Protection Product Manager to set roadmap and priorities
- Own the enterprise reference architecture for data-centric security across SaaS, web, endpoint, and cloud
- Define the architecture patterns, design standards, and guardrails that engineering teams build against
- Lead design for the most complex, novel, or high-risk problems — articulating options, trade-offs (security vs. usability vs. cost vs. operability), and a clear recommendation
- Serve as the top technical authority and design-review escalation point for the data protection function
- Provide hands-on mentorship and technical direction to senior engineers without formal reporting authority
- Prove out emerging technologies through hands-on POCs and pilots before enterprise adoption
- Architect enterprise-wide continuous discovery and classification of sensitive data across SaaS applications, cloud storage and object stores, and unstructured repositories
- Design the posture-analysis model for overshared or publicly exposed data, sensitive data sprawl, and misconfigured access controls
- Establish risk-based, automated remediation workflows in partnership with data owners and application teams
- Define continuous monitoring of data exposure and compliance posture at scale
- Design the enterprise eDLP architecture to inspect and control data in motion across web and cloud channels
- Own advanced detection strategy, including Exact Data Match (EDM) for structured sensitive data (PII, PCI, financial datasets) and Indexed Document Matching (IDM) for unstructured documents and intellectual-property protection
- Establish the engineering lifecycle for EDM data sets and IDM fingerprinting repositories — covering scale, freshness, and integrity
- Define real-time enforcement models (block, quarantine, alert, coach) balanced against business disruption
- Set the detection-tuning standards that systematically drive down false positives and false negatives
- Architect secure data-transfer controls across web uploads/downloads, SaaS file sharing and collaboration tools, and third-party/external data exchanges
- Design safeguards against unauthorized data exfiltration, risky upload behavior, and unapproved sharing channels
- Ensure controls enable legitimate business collaboration while maintaining strong data protection
- Design inline and API-based CASB architecture to secure enterprise SaaS platforms (e.g., collaboration suites, CRM, productivity clouds)
- Define granular access and session controls: inline transaction control (upload/download restrictions), session enforcement (block, coach, isolate, redact), and adaptive policy based on user, device, and risk context
- Establish detection and mitigation strategy for Shadow IT, OAuth app abuse, and SaaS misconfiguration or oversharing
- Align CASB architecture with Zero Trust principles and least-privilege access models
- Shape enterprise data governance strategy, connecting data classification, ownership, handling standards, and control enforcement into a coherent model
- Translate regulatory and framework obligations (e.g., NIST, PCI DSS, privacy regimes) into enforceable technical controls and data-handling standards
- Partner with legal, privacy, compliance, and data-owner communities to align governance policy with technical reality
- Define the data classification taxonomy and control mappings that downstream tooling enforces
- Partner with the Data Protection Product Manager to set the multi-quarter roadmap and prioritize investment
- Provide technical, feasibility, sequencing, and level-of-effort assessments that inform prioritization decisions
- Translate business and risk drivers into an actionable, engineering-grounded capability roadmap
- Represent the technical point of view in trade-off and prioritization discussions
- Define the data protection metrics model: sensitive data exposure trends, policy enforcement effectiveness, and data exfiltration attempts
- Establish standards for reviewing and tuning DLP and CASB alerts, focused on exfiltration and misuse
- Drive data risk assessments and continuous control validation
- Ensure policies maintain high efficacy with low business disruption
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
Led by a woman
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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