Principal Engineer, Privacy

Anthropic•Seattle, WA

5d•$485,000 - $625,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Anthropic is building frontier AI systems that handle sensitive information at enormous scale. The Principal Engineer, Privacy will set technical strategy for handling personal data across products, research, and infrastructure, and execute the most challenging parts of delivering that strategy. This senior individual-contributor role sits at the intersection of privacy engineering, distributed systems, and AI safety, addressing problems without established answers. The engineer will lead through influence, high-quality technical judgment, and trust rather than formal authority. The role establishes privacy architecture across product surfaces, research and training data, internal tooling, and multiple clouds. It involves leading company-critical initiatives, building foundational privacy primitives, and translating regulatory, contractual, and consent obligations into enforced technical controls in partnership with Legal, Policy, and Compliance. The engineer will also mentor senior engineers, raise privacy-design standards, help recruit senior privacy talent, and represent Anthropic's privacy engineering externally.

Requirements

Track record operating as a Principal Engineer or equivalent, setting technical direction adopted by multiple teams and delivering company-critical, multi-year initiatives.
Deep experience applying privacy engineering principles in production systems with a large user base, including privacy by design, data minimization, and purpose limitation.
Experience architecting data governance infrastructure—such as classification, lineage, access control, retention, or deletion—across distributed systems and cloud infrastructure at scale.
Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar languages, with effectiveness in writing design documents, making architectural decisions, and coding in critical paths.
Understanding of privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, and ability to partner with legal and policy experts to turn requirements into technical designs.
Written and verbal communication skills that build alignment across engineering, research, legal, and product teams, including with senior leadership.
Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training, and/or experience.
A field of study relevant to the role, demonstrated through coursework, training, or professional experience.
Years of experience will correlate with the internal job level requirements for the position.

Nice To Haves

Experience building privacy infrastructure or controls for machine learning or AI systems, including training-data governance or AI agents.
Hands-on experience with privacy-enhancing technologies such as differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure enclaves, or secure multi-party computation.
Experience establishing or re-architecting a privacy engineering practice under enterprise-customer or regulatory scrutiny.
Experience briefing executives, auditors, regulators, or enterprise customers on privacy risk and defending recommendations under challenge.
A history of growing engineers into Staff-level and more senior roles.
Contributions to open-source privacy tooling, privacy research, or industry standards.

Responsibilities

Define and drive technical strategy and architecture for major privacy areas across product surfaces, research and training data, internal tooling, and multiple clouds.
Identify and lead high-complexity, company-critical privacy initiatives, guide engineers across teams, and build the most difficult components when needed.
Architect privacy primitives for data discovery, classification, lineage, purpose-based access control, audit, retention, deletion, and export.
Translate regulatory, contractual, and consent obligations—including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and the EU AI Act—into enforced and continuously verified technical controls with Legal, Policy, and Compliance.
Anticipate developments in AI capabilities, regulation, and customer expectations and position systems to address them.
Mentor and develop staff and senior staff engineers, raise privacy-design standards across engineering, and help hire senior privacy talent.
Represent Anthropic's privacy engineering to customers, regulators, standards bodies, and the research community.