Staff Privacy Engineer, Google Ads

The Ads Privacy team is tasked with ensuring that Google’s advertising products, from infrastructure to AI, operate smoothly and sustainably by keeping our promise to user privacy.

As a Staff Privacy Engineer, you will be a partner who builds privacy into the products from the ground up. You will move beyond individual feature reviews to define the technical privacy strategy for entire product areas. You will collaborate with product management and engineering leadership to understand long-term roadmaps, anticipating privacy needs before they become blockers.

In this role, you will be an architect of trust. You will design the scalable systems and guardrails that allow our business to innovate efficiently while protecting user data. You will identify risks and engineer the solutions that enable teams to meet their goals safely and effectively.

Google Ads is helping power the open internet with the best technology that connects and creates value for people, publishers, advertisers, and Google. We’re made up of multiple teams, building Google’s Advertising products including search, display, shopping, travel and video advertising, as well as analytics. Our teams create trusted experiences between people and businesses with useful ads. We help grow businesses of all sizes from small businesses, to large brands, to YouTube creators, with effective advertiser tools that deliver measurable results. We also enable Google to engage with customers at scale.

The US base salary range for this full-time position is $207,000-$300,000 + bonus + equity + benefits. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. Within the range, individual pay is determined by work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Please note that the compensation details listed in US role postings reflect the base salary only, and do not include bonus, equity, or benefits. Learn more about benefits at Google.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Product Management and Engineering to align privacy engineering initiatives with long-term product roadmaps. Anticipate future business needs and design privacy architectures that support them.
• Lead the privacy design for Google’s most complex systems. Advocate "privacy-by-design" principles, working with teams to build robust, scalable privacy controls directly into the infrastructure.
• Act as a bridge between Legal, Product, and Engineering. Translate complex regulatory requirements and privacy principles into clear, actionable engineering strategies that enable business success.
• Design privacy systems that meet the business where they are for performance, feasibility, and scalability. Build efficient solutions that protect user privacy without sacrificing product velocity.
• Foster a culture of privacy awareness and excellence. Mentor junior privacy engineers and broader engineering teams, establish organizational standards that make privacy an integral part of the development lifecycle.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 7 years of experience working in a privacy related field (e.g., security engineering, data engineering, data scientist, compliance engineering etc.).
• 2 years of experience managing initiatives and solutions for technological problems that maintain or elevate the privacy posture of an organization.
• 2 years of experience with privacy technologies or frameworks to solve technical and operational problems, and customizing existing solutions and frameworks to support business objectives.

Preferred qualifications:

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Privacy, or a related field.
• Experience engaging key stakeholders, driving consensus, and unblocking challenges to land changes across multiple business units.
• Experience collaborating with and engaging the external privacy community (e.g. publications, conferences, talks, certifications, etc.).
• Ability to anticipate future privacy challenges and engineer solutions that enable business growth.

Note: By applying to this position you will have an opportunity to share your preferred working location from the following: Mountain View, CA, USA; New York, NY, USA.