Senior Data Security Privacy Engineer

Position: Senior Staff Data Security Privacy Engineer

About Coursera

Coursera was founded in 2012 by Stanford professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller to make world‑class learning accessible to everyone, everywhere. Today, over 190 million learners and 375+ university and industry partners use our platform to gain skills in fields like AI, data science, technology, and business. As a Delaware public benefit corporation and Certified B Corp, we’re driven by the belief that learning can transform lives through learning.

Why

Join Us

At Coursera, we’re looking for inventors, innovators, and lifelong learners ready to shape the future of education. You’ll help build global programs and tools that power online learning for millions, turning bold ideas into real impact. People who thrive here are customer‑first builders who move fast, simplify ruthlessly, and iterate relentlessly on the metrics that matter.

Job Overview

As a Sr. Staff Engineer, Data Security and Privacy, you will play a critical role in designing, building, and scaling the systems, processes, and controls that protect the company and our users’ data and ensure trust in our products. Working as part of the Information Security team, you will partner closely with Engineering, Legal, and cross‑functional stakeholders to embed privacy‑by‑design principles into our infrastructure and translate regulatory requirements into scalable technical solutions.

This is a hands‑on role for a senior individual contributor who thrives at the intersection of security, privacy, and data infrastructure. You will shape how we discover, classify, and protect information, lead privacy risk mitigation efforts, and help evolve our data security capabilities as the company grows.

Responsibilities Privacy by Design and Technical Enablement

• Partner with Engineering, Legal, Product, IT, and other cross‑functional stakeholders to design and embed privacy and data protection principles across the entire organization, from product development to operations.
• Translate legal and regulatory obligations into actionable technical requirements, policies, and controls.
• Develop privacy‑enhancing capabilities such as data minimisation, anonymisation, and access‑control frameworks that scale with our infrastructure.

Data Discovery, Classification, and Mapping

• Design and implement data classification and handling frameworks to provide appropriate protection throughout the data lifecycle.
• Build and maintain comprehensive data inventories and data flow maps, identifying where data resides and how it is processed across systems.
• Collaborate with Engineering teams to apply appropriate controls at every point in the data pipeline.

Risk Assessment, Monitoring, and Compliance Execution

• Conduct technical risk assessments of internal and third‑party systems and applications to identify, evaluate, and mitigate privacy and data security risks, including vulnerabilities, misuse, and compliance gaps.
• Contribute to Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) by assessing the technical and security implications of new processing activities.
• Partner with Legal to transform evolving regulatory frameworks (e.g., GDPR, CCPA, NIST, ISO) into secure, scalable engineering solutions that drive compliance and build user trust.

Incident Response and Breach Management

• Lead and coordinate the company’s technical response to data breaches or security incidents, enabling timely investigation, effective mitigation, and root‑cause analysis.
• Design and implement processes and tooling to detect, investigate, and remediate incidents in compliance with applicable laws.

Privacy Automation and Process Enablement

• Partner with stakeholders to design and implement automated workflows and tools to streamline privacy operations, including data subject rights requests and data deletion workflows.
• Deploy and manage data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities across endpoints, applications, and infrastructure to prevent unauthorised disclosure of sensitive data.
• Implement continuous auditing, monitoring, and alerting to track compliance posture and surface security and operational privacy risks proactively.

Cross‑Functional Collaboration and Enablement

• Act as a trusted advisor to stakeholders on the…