Senior Backend Engineer, Clean-Room Query Engine

Role overview

Build the query engine at the center of a privacy-preserving data platform. The engine runs SQL and machine learning across datasets contributed by multiple parties, aiming to return useful results without exposing the underlying records. This senior individual contributor role focuses on correctness, performance, privacy guarantees, and producing defensible evidence for each query.

Responsibilities

- Develop SQL planning and execution across datasets from multiple parties, including choices among direct, split-merge, and hash-join strategies. - Implement differential privacy mechanisms, calibrate noise, enforce privacy budgets, and reject queries that exceed permitted disclosure limits. - Enforce k-anonymity and l-diversity thresholds at result aggregation boundaries, including difficult edge cases. - Integrate secure multi-party computation techniques such as secure aggregation and secret sharing where differential privacy alone is insufficient. - Build privacy-preserving machine learning capabilities, including lookalike modeling and outputs bounded by differential privacy. - Maintain an audit trail that links query evidence to relevant privacy and security controls.

Requirements

- Six or more years building production distributed systems in Go, Rust, C++, or modern Java or Scala. - Practical experience with database internals or distributed query engines such as Trino, Spark, ClickHouse, or DuckDB. - Familiarity with privacy-enhancing technologies; the provided role excerpt begins this qualification but does not include the full list of required privacy technologies. - Ability to work on systems where query correctness, performance, cryptographic discipline, and auditability are central concerns.

Nice to have

- Academic or applied experience in privacy research or cryptography. - Exposure to confidential computing runtimes such as Intel SGX, AMD SEV, or AWS Nitro Enclaves. - Contributions to privacy technology standards work, including NIST, ISO, or IETF. - Familiarity with formal methods tools such as TLA+, Coq, or Dafny.

Benefits and work setup

The role offers competitive senior individual contributor compensation, equity, healthcare, a learning budget, and conference attendance. Work is hybrid at a Dubai headquarters with a remote-first culture and collaboration across GCC and EMEA time zones.