Principal Engineer, Privacy

Details

Anthropic is seeking a principal privacy engineer to define technical strategy for handling personal data across products, research, infrastructure, and multiple clouds. The role operates at the intersection of privacy engineering, distributed systems, and AI safety, addressing complex problems without established solutions and leading through technical influence rather than formal authority.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive technical strategy and architecture for major privacy initiatives spanning product surfaces, research and training data, internal tooling, and multiple clouds.
• Lead high-complexity, company-critical privacy initiatives across many engineering teams, while building the most difficult components when necessary.
• Architect privacy primitives for data discovery, classification, lineage, purpose-based access control, auditing, 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 in partnership with Legal, Policy, and Compliance.
• Anticipate developments in AI capabilities, regulation, and customer expectations and position systems accordingly.
• Mentor staff and senior staff engineers, raise the standard for privacy design across engineering, and help recruit senior privacy talent.
• Represent Anthropic's privacy engineering work to customers, regulators, standards bodies, and the research community.

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 production experience applying privacy engineering principles at large scale, 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.
• Proficiency in Python, Go, or similar programming languages, with the ability to write design documents, make architectural decisions, and code in critical paths.
• Understanding of privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, with the ability to collaborate with legal and policy experts as a technical peer.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for building alignment across engineering, research, legal, product, and senior leadership teams.
• A bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education, training, and experience in a relevant field.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.
• History of developing engineers into Staff-level and more senior roles.
• Contributions to open-source privacy tooling, privacy research, or industry standards.

Compensation

Annual salary: $485,000-$625,000 USD.

Work Policy and Benefits

The role is remote-friendly but requires travel. Anthropic currently expects staff to work from one of its offices at least 25% of the time, although some roles may require more office time. Anthropic sponsors visas where possible and provides immigration lawyer support. Benefits include competitive compensation and benefits, optional equity donation matching, generous vacation and parental leave, flexible working hours, and office collaboration spaces.