Staff Software Engineer, Privacy & Safety Regulations

Etsy•New York, NY

1d•$178,000 - $267,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Etsy is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its Privacy & Safety Regulations team. This full-time role reports to the Engineering Manager, Privacy & Safety Regulations. The team is responsible for building systems, platforms, and engineering practices that ensure Etsy processes and accesses personal data in accordance with customer expectations. They collaborate with Product, Engineering, Privacy Legal, Security, Trust & Safety, Marketing Technology, and other teams to make privacy-preserving actions the easiest to implement. The team values collaboration, speed to learning, equitable treatment, inclusivity, and diversity. This position is ideal for a Staff-level engineer with a background in software engineering, security engineering, privacy engineering, or a related technical field, who possesses foundational knowledge of security and/or privacy, strong systems judgment, and the ability to translate broad requirements into practical, durable engineering solutions. Legal or regulatory experience is a plus. The team primarily uses PHP and MySQL, and the engineering culture supports career growth and learning.

Requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience (or Staff-level equivalent) leading architecture and delivery for complex, ambiguous systems.
Strong hands-on expertise building reliable backend platforms, APIs, and distributed systems within large codebases.
Proficiency in at least one production language (PHP, Python, Java, Go, etc.) with a focus on clean, testable, and maintainable software.
Experience with cloud infrastructure (ideally GCP), CI/CD, service observability, and production incident response.
Ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs clearly and build cross-functional alignment across product, legal, and engineering teams.
Collaborative approach to working with legal, compliance, security, and risk partners to turn policy requirements into scalable engineering controls.
Foundational knowledge of privacy-by-design, data minimization, access controls, data pipelines, metadata systems, PII discovery, classification, and lineage.

Nice To Haves

Legal or regulatory experience is welcome.

Responsibilities

Lead the technical design and scale of marketplace-wide privacy platforms, ensuring high reliability, observability, and performance.
Build and optimize systems for consent/preference management, data access/deletion requests, classification, and Safety by Design workflows.
Partner with Legal to translate sophisticated compliance requirements into practical APIs, data models, and implementation plans.
Create paved paths, reusable patterns, and documentation that make building privacy-preserving features default and effortless for developers.
Contribute to production code, evaluate build-vs-buy decisions, and drive technical quality through architecture and code reviews.
Mitigate architectural risks, supervise privacy metrics, join support rotations, and automate operational toil using self-service tooling.
Guide and pair with engineers to resolve technical ambiguity and drive execution across teams.