Privacy Architect

Apple•Cupertino, CA

About The Position

Apple’s Wallet, Payments, and Commerce (WPC) teams build services including Apple Pay, Apple Cash, and Tap to Pay. Apple is seeking a Principal Engineer to serve as the technical authority for privacy across WPC engineering. This role owns how WPC collects, processes, retains, and protects user data across a global, regulated ecosystem, including the approach to user consent, data minimization, logging architecture, and privacy risk. The Privacy Architect will own WPC’s privacy architecture and multi-year roadmap, establish shared privacy engineering frameworks, and make privacy-by-design the default throughout development and launch. The role leads through influence, supplying frameworks, decisions, and escalation judgment that help the Privacy Compliance team conduct assessments, monitoring, and training consistently and at scale. The position partners with WPC leadership and Apple’s central privacy teams, including Apple Privacy Legal and User Privacy, to assess offerings against global standards, translate regulatory requirements into engineering guidance, and design architectural enhancements. It also anticipates emerging regulation and AI-driven commerce risks and briefs senior leadership.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in privacy engineering, security engineering, or related architecture roles.
Deep expertise in privacy engineering, including data minimization, consent architecture, logging design, and privacy-preserving patterns at production scale.
Command of global regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, with the ability to translate them into engineering decisions.
Track record defining standards or platforms adopted across large, complex engineering organizations.
Ability to lead through influence with senior engineers and compliance practitioners who do not report to the role.
Ability to make defensible architectural decisions under regulatory ambiguity and align legal, product, and engineering leadership.
Experience using generative AI to build tools, automate risk identification, or accelerate engineering workflows in regulated environments.
Exceptional written and verbal communication, including executive briefings and regulator-facing material.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Payments, financial services, or other regulated-domain experience, including audit expectations, partner privacy requirements, and frameworks such as NIST, SOC 2, and ISO 27001.
Hands-on experience building shared privacy platforms, such as consent management, PII detection, or data lineage.
Experience representing engineering in external regulatory engagements, partner privacy reviews, or industry working groups.

Responsibilities

Own WPC’s privacy architecture and multi-year roadmap across offering teams.
Establish tooling, review gates, and AI-assisted capabilities that make privacy-by-design the default from design through launch and beyond.
Design and own a centralized privacy engineering framework covering consent, data minimization, logging, and retention, and drive its adoption as a shared standard.
Architect WPC’s logging and telemetry strategy to be operationally useful, privacy-preserving, and compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and emerging global frameworks.
Define the privacy impact assessment (PIA) methodology, risk taxonomy, control standards, and monitoring architecture for the Privacy Compliance team to execute at scale.
Automate risk identification wherever possible.
Resolve high-risk and ambiguous privacy decisions, set reusable precedents, review critical system designs, and own remediation strategy for systemic risk.
Serve as WPC’s primary technical interface to Apple’s Privacy organization and legal counsel, translating regulation into clear engineering guidance.
Work with leadership to define a comprehensive privacy strategy and contribute to technical discussions about current and emerging privacy requirements.
Partner with Apple central privacy teams to evaluate existing and new offerings against global privacy standards and design architectural enhancements.
Anticipate emerging regulation and AI-driven commerce risk, and brief senior leadership.