Senior/Staff Software Engineer, Data Lifecycle

About the Role

You’ll design and build the platform infrastructure that let customers control how their data is collected, retained, redacted, and deleted. That means strong engineering underneath, and clear abstractions on top that hold up across different enterprise requirements without forking per customer.

You’ll work day to day with product management, governance, and security: understanding customer requirements, defining data handling guarantees, reviewing designs, and iterating through launch. You’ll stay close enough to customers to understand their privacy and operational needs in depth and to ensure what you’re building is actually right for them.

Engineers here own features end to end, from technical architecture through deployment and the iteration after it. On this team, that includes verifying that sensitive data is protected and the action actually completes. An understanding of durable and fault-tolerant systems is key.

In this role, you will

• Build PII handling and redaction systems that identify and protect sensitive information across conversations, agent traces, and other customer data
• Design configuration abstractions for redaction and retention policies that balance enterprise flexibility with clear, safe defaults
• Build reliable data deletion workflows that propagate across storage systems and derived data, with retries, verification, and visibility into failures
• Build self-serve tools and APIs that let customers configure, test, and understand their data lifecycle policies without relying on an engineer
• Build LLM-backed systems that scan and detect data anomalies and violations
• Train and/or tune models for detecting data of various forms (including PII and PHI)
• Extend redaction and identification to multimodal agents, including images, attachments, voice notes, and documents.
• Build monitoring and auditability that make it clear what data was processed, what remains, and where a policy has failed-without exposing sensitive information in the process
• Handle data lifecycle systems at scale, including backfills, partial failures, and safe rollouts; your work will touch critical flows for Fortune 100 companies

Your background and skillset look something like this

• 4+ years building software products, with strong product thinking
• Proficient in Python, comfortable working across the entire stack
• Experience designing reliable backend systems and data pipelines, including asynchronous processing, retries, and failure recovery
• Understanding of what operational maturity looks like for critical systems, including observability and monitoring
• Complex systems instincts: you can reason about where data flows, where copies persist, and what happens when one part of a workflow fails
• A high degree of comfort debugging system failures in deep technology stacks, using whatever tool gets you to the answer
• Judgment about when to ship fast and when correctness, privacy, and irreversible operations require slowing down

Even better

• Experience with PII detection, redaction, tokenization, or secure handling of sensitive data
• Experience building data retention, deletion, or privacy request workflows across multiple storage systems
• Experience building security-sensitive product systems, such as authentication, authorization, and data access controls
• Familiarity with privacy and compliance requirements such as GDPR, CCPA, or PCI, and translating them into engineering controls
• Background with LLMs, evals, or AI agent systems, especially handling sensitive data in model inputs, outputs, and traces
• Experience with observability, audit trails, or operational tooling for large-scale data systems
• Work with sensitive data in voice, images, or other non-text formats

Compensation $200K - $400K + Offers Equity

This range reflects the expected compensation for this role. Compensation within the range is determined based on experience, skills, and the scope of responsibilities, with flexibility for candidates who demonstrate exceptional impact.

Pay and benefits

In addition to base salary, we offer competitive equity. Final compensation may vary based on location within the United States.

Benefits

We proudly offer the following benefits for our full-time employees:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits for you and your family
• Life Insurance and Disability Benefits
• Retirement Plan (e.g., 401K, pension)
• Parental Leave
• Fertility and family building benefits through Carrot
• Monthly stipend to support your wellness, lifestyle, and work-life balance
• Daily lunches and snacks in the office to keep you at your best
• Take what you need vacation policy (subject to local requirements; UK employees receive 25 days of statutory leave)

These benefits are described in more detail in Decagon’s policies, may vary by location, and can change at any time according to applicable compensation and benefits plans.