Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Data Lifecycle

Decagon • New York, NY

2d • $200,000 - $400,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Decagon is hiring a Senior/Staff Software Engineer for its Data Lifecycle team, which builds systems governing how sensitive customer data is handled throughout its lifetime. The role involves designing and building infrastructure that lets customers control data collection, retention, redaction, and deletion, with reliable systems underneath and clear abstractions that support varied enterprise requirements without customer-specific forks.

The engineer will work closely with product management, governance, and security to understand customer requirements, define data-handling guarantees, review designs, and iterate through launches. Engineers own features end to end, from technical architecture through deployment and ongoing iteration. The work requires verifying that sensitive data is protected and that actions complete successfully, with an emphasis on durable and fault-tolerant systems. The systems serve critical flows for large enterprises and operate across chat, voice, email, and SMS.

Decagon is an in-office company. The listed compensation range is $200,000–$400,000 plus equity; compensation depends on experience, skills, responsibility scope, and U.S. location.

Requirements

• At least 4 years building software products, with strong product thinking.
• Proficiency in Python and comfort working across the entire stack.
• Experience designing reliable backend systems and data pipelines, including asynchronous processing, retries, and failure recovery.
• Understanding of operational maturity for critical systems, including observability and monitoring.
• Ability to reason about complex systems, including data flows, persistent copies, and failure scenarios across workflows.
• Comfort debugging system failures in deep technology stacks using appropriate tools.
• Sound judgment about when to ship quickly and when correctness, privacy, and irreversible operations require slowing down.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with PII detection, redaction, tokenization, or secure handling of sensitive data.
• Experience building data retention, deletion, or privacy request workflows across multiple storage systems.
• Experience building security-sensitive product systems, such as authentication, authorization, and data access controls.
• Familiarity with privacy and compliance requirements such as GDPR, CCPA, or PCI, and translating them into engineering controls.
• Background with LLMs, evaluations, or AI agent systems, especially handling sensitive data in model inputs, outputs, and traces.
• Experience with observability, audit trails, or operational tooling for large-scale data systems.
• Experience working with sensitive data in voice, images, or other non-text formats.

Responsibilities

• Build PII handling and redaction systems that identify and protect sensitive information across conversations, agent traces, and other customer data.
• Design configuration abstractions for redaction and retention policies that balance enterprise flexibility with clear, safe defaults.
• Build reliable data deletion workflows that propagate across storage systems and derived data, with retries, verification, and visibility into failures.
• Build self-serve tools and APIs so customers can configure, test, and understand data lifecycle policies without relying on an engineer.
• Build LLM-backed systems to scan for and detect data anomalies and violations.
• Train and/or tune models to detect different forms of data, including PII and PHI.
• Extend redaction and identification capabilities to multimodal agents, including images, attachments, voice notes, and documents.
• Build monitoring and auditability that show what data was processed, what remains, and where policies have failed without exposing sensitive information.
• Handle data lifecycle systems at scale, including backfills, partial failures, and safe rollouts.
• Work with product management, governance, and security to understand customer requirements, define data-handling guarantees, review designs, and iterate through launch.
• Own features end to end, from technical architecture through deployment and post-launch iteration, and verify that sensitive data is protected and actions complete.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits for employees and their families.
• Life insurance and disability benefits.
• Retirement plan, such as a 401(k) or pension.
• Parental leave.
• Fertility and family-building benefits through Carrot.
• Monthly wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance stipend.
• Daily lunches and snacks in the office.
• Take-what-you-need vacation policy, subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave.
• Competitive equity.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed