Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Privacy and compliance engineering has become a core competency for modern SaaS platforms, especially those operating at scale with rich data access patterns. This role sits at the intersection of backend infrastructure and governance, focusing on turning privacy obligations into enforceable, testable system behavior rather than documentation. Work like policy driven access control, auditability, and lifecycle controls is increasingly central as SaaS products expand across regions, customer segments, and data types.
For a SaaS engineering career, the durable value here is learning how to build platform primitives that other teams rely on. Experience designing distributed authorization, embedding privacy by design into data services, and instrumenting compliance observability translates well to roles in platform engineering, security engineering, and data governance across subscription software companies. The cross functional collaboration with product, infrastructure, security, and legal also reflects how mature SaaS organizations operationalize risk and trust.
This position tends to fit engineers who enjoy turning ambiguous regulatory requirements into clear technical interfaces and defaults. It also suits practitioners who prefer systems that must be correct, inspectable, and resilient, and who are comfortable influencing standards across multiple teams rather than optimizing a single service in isolation.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
We’re looking for a Software Engineer to architect and build backend systems that enforce data privacy and automate compliance at scale. You’ll work closely with product, infrastructure, security, and legal teams to embed privacy-by-design into our data and access layers.
This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an experienced engineer who is passionate about protecting user data while enabling innovation.
What You’ll Do
Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce policy-driven data access, lifecycle controls, and privacy protections.
Develop distributed authorization and identity-aware enforcement mechanisms integrated directly into data services and control planes.
Implement auditability, policy hooks, and enforcement observability to ensure compliance is continuously verifiable.
Partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance to convert privacy requirements into scalable technical designs and developer-friendly APIs.
Harden data platforms and backend services through schema-level controls and data handling constraints by default.
Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure consistent enforcement across systems while minimizing duplicated implementations.
Contribute patterns, libraries, and education that elevate trustworthy data access patterns across the organization.
You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have
5+ years of industry experience building and operating backend or infrastructure systems in production.
Strong software engineering fundamentals, with fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, C++, Java).
Experience with distributed authorization, RBAC/ACL systems, encryption-based access, or policy engines.
Familiarity with global privacy regulations and their architectural implications.
Ability to influence and collaborate with teams across legal, compliance, product, and engineering.
A bias toward practical, impactful solutions that balance privacy protections with product needs.
Nice to Have
Experience with cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP) and large-scale data systems.
Background in security engineering, privacy engineering, or data governance.
Experience with control-plane or metadata-driven enforcement systems.
Exposure to data platforms or ML infrastructure.
Prior experience in a regulated or highly sensitive data environment.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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