Sr Data Protection Engineer

Job Title: Sr Data Protection Engineer

Location: New York, NY

Job Summary The Senior Data Protection Engineer plays a key role in advancing enterprise data governance and data protection initiatives. This individual contributor role is responsible for designing, implementing, and optimizing data protection solutions and data governance workflows using platforms such as Databricks, Securiti.ai, Anomalo, and Atlan. Working closely with data governance analysts, product managers, and business and technology teams, the Data Protection Engineer delivers capabilities including data scanning for PII/PHI detection, data protection using tokenization and masking, and data risk measurement, monitoring, and mitigation; supporting the organization's Data Strategy and enabling timely, data-driven decisions built on trusted information.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain automated data protection routines for enterprise data lakes in AWS (Redshift, Databricks) and GCP (BigQuery, PostgreSQL), for both structured and unstructured data.
• Configure, test, and maintain Databricks, Anomalo, Atlan, and Securiti.ai platform functionality, including building custom connectors and running BAU platform operations.
• Build hands-on solutions, prototypes, dashboards, and lightweight applications using Python, SQL, Streamlit, Databricks, and related tools.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define data protection requirements for critical data elements and support remediation prioritization.
• Create clear documentation and reporting to communicate findings, standards, and recommendations.
• Drive adoption of governance tools through roadshows, training sessions, user enablement, and data owner/steward playbooks.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies by contributing to backlog building and sprint events in Jira.

Requirements

• 5–7+ years of professional experience, including 2–3+ years in a data protection function.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of data governance frameworks, data protection and remediation, tagging, data quality, and metadata management concepts.
• Strong proficiency with SQL, Python, and data modeling and analysis concepts.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks, Securiti.ai, Anomalo, Atlan, or similar data governance and protection tools.
• Prior experience with data protection routine rollouts for PII/PHI structured and unstructured data is a standout skill.
• Understanding of security and authentication patterns (e.g., AWS Secrets Manager) and protection algorithms (e.g., tokenization, masking).
• Backend development experience including PostgreSQL, data modeling, query optimization and indexing, connection pooling, and strong SQL skills with the ability to analyze and validate data lineage.
• Software development skills including solutions design, deployment management (SDLC patterns, CI/CD, Harness), and testing (unit testing, integration testing, test automation, test suites).
• Experience working in Agile environments using Jira, Confluence, and SharePoint.
• Excellent communication, documentation, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience with Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) initiatives.
• Exposure to AI-enabled governance accelerators, metadata enrichment, and cataloging tools.
• Experience supporting data modernization or cloud migration initiatives in enterprise settings.