Principal Data Protection Engineer

Who are we?

Equinix is the world’s digital infrastructure company®, shortening the path to connectivity to enable the innovations that enrich our work, life and planet. 

A place where tech thinkers and future builders turn bold ideas into breakthrough experiences, we welcome your unique perspective.

Help us challenge assumptions, uncover bias, and remove barriers—because progress starts with fresh ideas. You’ll find belonging, purpose, and a team that welcomes you—because when you feel valued, you’re empowered to do your best work.

Job Summary

The Digital Information Security Engineering team is seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Protection Engineer to lead the design, development, and automation of data protection capabilities embedded across enterprise platforms and services. This role focuses on protecting sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, enabling privacy-by-design architectures, and building developer-first APIs and AI-enabled solutions that integrate seamlessly into modern engineering workflows.

 

The ideal candidate is a hands-on technical leader with deep expertise in data protection, privacy engineering, and secure data architecture, combined with strong software development skills and a forward-looking mindset around AI, agentic agents, and autonomous systems.

 

Responsibilities

Data Protection & Privacy Engineering

• Design and implement data protection controls across data ingress, processing, storage, inference, and egress layers (e.g., classification, tokenization, encryption, masking, policy enforcement)

• Define and operationalize privacy-by-design and secure-by-default patterns for platforms, APIs, and AI-driven systems

• Evaluate and implement data governance, consent, residency, retention, and deletion mechanisms aligned with regulatory and enterprise requirements

• Analyze and assess data flows to identify privacy risks, data exposure paths, and compliance gaps

 

API & Platform Engineering

• Design, develop, and deliver high-quality, production-grade APIs that expose data protection and privacy capabilities as reusable services

• Own the API layer design, including authentication, authorization, schema design, rate limiting, observability, and security controls

• Research, select, and implement technologies for API gateways, service orchestration, and platform integration

• Ensure APIs meet published SLAs and SLOs, with built-in instrumentation and monitoring

 

Software Development & Automation

• Develop core services, tooling, and automation primarily using Python and Go (Golang).

• Build integrations, hooks, plugins, and pipelines that leverage data from security, privacy, and AI platforms

• Automate data protection workflows across CI/CD pipelines and cloud platforms

• Perform rigorous testing and validation to ensure reliability, scalability, and performance

 

AI, Agentic Systems & Emerging Technologies

• Evaluate and integrate AI and open-source technologies to enhance data protection, detection, and enforcement

• Design or contribute to agentic agents and autonomous workflows that make context-aware decisions about data use, access, and policy enforcement

• Partner with AI platform teams to address data protection challenges in model training, fine-tuning, inference, and RAG systems

• Research emerging trends in AI safety, privacy-preserving ML, and secure data sharing

 

Technical Leadership & Delivery

• Collaborate closely with Product Management and cross-functional engineering teams to translate requirements into technical solutions

• Anticipate architectural and delivery risks; proactively resolve or escalate technical roadblocks

• Own technical implementation end-to-end from design through production and operations

• Operate, support, and continuously improve data protection services in live environments

 

Leadership Characteristics

• Is a transformational leader who excels at driving bold and meaningful change at scale and across multiple dimensions