Senior Software Engineer (Privacy) (x/f/m) - Tech Foundations
Senior Software Engineer · Senior · Full Time
Opens Alan's application page
Role
What you'll do.
Join Alan's Data Foundations team as a Senior Software Engineer (Privacy) to architect and operate the GDPR Orchestrator platform that manages sensitive healthcare data lifecycle across a health insurance platform serving 1M+ members. This role combines platform engineering, privacy-by-design principles, and cross-functional leadership to enable 15+ product teams with self-serve data governance capabilities while maintaining compliance with European healthcare regulations.
Responsibilities
- Own and Evolve the Privacy Platform: Design, build, and operate the core GDPR Orchestrator platform engine managing data retention, deletion, anonymization, and pseudonymization across Alan's systems. Establish robust safety mechanisms including preview and dry-run capabilities, maintain comprehensive audit trails, and ensure operational reliability through health monitoring, deployment pipelines, and observability instrumentation. Scale the platform architecture to support increasing adoption while maintaining data integrity and compliance standards.
- Build and Maintain the Paved Road: Create comprehensive documentation, templates, libraries, and self-serve tooling enabling 15+ product areas to independently manage their own data rules on top of the privacy platform. Coach teams through technical pairing sessions and architectural reviews to build organizational capability. Transform reactive support into proactive enablement, measuring success by how effectively teams operate autonomously without platform team intervention.
- Cross-Functional Coordination and Stakeholder Alignment: Bridge legal, security, data, and product teams by translating regulatory requirements into technical specifications and architectural decisions. Surface cross-area data dependencies, resolve design trade-offs, and establish clear governance boundaries. Lead design discussions on complex privacy challenges while ensuring each product area remains accountable for its own data handling and compliance obligations.
- Platform Roadmap Development and Capability Expansion: Drive open platform design questions to completion, establishing long-term technical direction for the GDPR Orchestrator. Identify gaps in data lifecycle management capabilities as Alan expands internationally into new countries and markets. Propose and implement platform enhancements that raise safety, observability, and developer experience standards, enabling teams to handle data with confidence at scale.
- Production Operations and Incident Response: Take ownership of deployed systems through on-call rotations, incident response coordination, and operational excellence. Implement observability solutions using Datadog and CloudFlare monitoring, establish alerting policies, manage rollouts and deployments, and drive post-incident reviews. Continuously improve system reliability and performance through data-driven decision-making and preventive engineering practices.
- Technical Design and Communication: Craft detailed technical design documents, architecture diagrams, and dependency maps that communicate complex system interactions to diverse stakeholder groups. Author RFC documents for significant platform decisions, facilitate technical discussions across multiple teams, and ensure architectural clarity across documentation. Transform technical complexity into clear communication that guides implementation and aligns organizational direction.
Qualifications
What we look for.
Technical
Backend Software Engineering
Deep expertise in backend platform and service architecture with 8+ years of production software engineering experience. Proficiency in designing APIs, contracts, and data models that other engineers depend on. Experience building and operating platform-level services with focus on reliability, scalability, and developer experience.
Python and TypeScript Proficiency
Strong hands-on coding capability in Python (Flask-based systems) and TypeScript. Ability to write production-grade code across backend services, infrastructure automation, and frontend integrations. Comfortable shipping code to production and taking operational ownership of implemented systems.
Cloud Infrastructure and DevOps
Practical experience with AWS and GCP cloud platforms, Kubernetes container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform/Terramate), and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions). Understanding of distributed systems deployment, monitoring, and operational excellence practices in production environments.
Data Systems and Database Design
Strong understanding of relational database design (PostgreSQL), data modeling for compliance, and caching strategies (Redis). Experience with data lifecycle management, retention policies, and designing systems that handle sensitive information securely and compliantly.
Privacy, GDPR, and Data Governance
Demonstrated experience with privacy-by-design principles, GDPR requirements (data deletion, anonymization, retention), and data governance frameworks. Understanding of privacy impact assessments, regulatory compliance documentation, and working with legal and security teams on data handling policies. Prior experience with authority-facing compliance work (such as CNIL) is valuable.
Platform and Enabling Team Models
Experience designing and operating platform teams that serve internal customers (other engineering teams). Understanding of how to build reusable abstractions, documentation, and self-serve tooling that enable teams to work independently. Familiarity with distributed ownership models and the tension between central governance and team autonomy.
Education
Computer Science or Related Field
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. Strong foundation in computer systems, algorithms, and software architecture principles required for complex platform design work.
Experience
Senior-Level Backend Engineering
Minimum 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with significant focus on backend services, platform architecture, and production systems ownership. Demonstrated progression from mid-level to senior-level responsibilities including API design decisions, system architecture influence, and mentorship of junior engineers.
Platform Team or Enabling Team Leadership
Track record of working on platform or infrastructure teams that serve multiple internal customers. Experience building libraries, SDKs, or platforms that other engineers depend on, with demonstrated focus on developer experience, documentation, and enabling team autonomy. Success metrics including adoption rates and reduction of support burden.
Cross-Functional Stakeholder Management
Proven ability to influence and align teams that don't report directly to you, including legal, security, data, and product teams. Experience navigating complex organizational structures, translating requirements across technical and non-technical stakeholders, and driving decisions to completion in matrix environments.
Privacy or Compliance Engineering
Prior experience working on privacy, GDPR, data governance, or compliance-focused engineering projects. Understanding of regulatory requirements, working with legal and compliance teams, and the technical implications of privacy regulations. Experience with data deletion, anonymization, or other privacy-preserving technologies is a strong plus.
Production Operations and On-Call Experience
Demonstrated ownership of running production systems including incident response coordination, post-incident reviews, and operational excellence improvements. Comfort with on-call rotations, monitoring/observability tools, and taking personal accountability for system reliability. Track record of learning from incidents and implementing preventive improvements.
Skills
Required
Python
Production-grade Python development for backend services, API implementations, and infrastructure automation scripts. Experience with Flask framework, async patterns, and Python best practices for maintainable systems.
TypeScript
Modern TypeScript development for full-stack applications. Understanding of type systems, async/await patterns, and creating maintainable type-safe abstractions that prevent runtime errors.
API and Contract Design
Designing well-documented, versioned APIs with clear contracts that other teams depend on. Understanding of REST principles, GraphQL, gRPC, or other API paradigms. Ability to make tradeoffs between flexibility and simplicity.
SQL and Data Modeling
Expert-level database design using PostgreSQL, including normalization, indexing strategies, query optimization, and schema evolution. Understanding of transaction models, consistency guarantees, and data integrity constraints.
Kubernetes Orchestration
Proficiency deploying, managing, and troubleshooting applications in Kubernetes clusters. Understanding of pods, services, deployments, ConfigMaps, persistent volumes, and resource management in containerized environments.
Infrastructure-as-Code
Experience with Terraform and Terramate for managing cloud infrastructure definitions. Understanding of state management, modularity, and GitOps principles for reproducible infrastructure deployments.
Cloud Platforms (AWS/GCP)
Hands-on experience with AWS and Google Cloud Platform services including compute, storage, networking, identity/access management, and monitoring solutions. Understanding of multi-cloud strategies and service selection criteria.
GDPR and Data Privacy Regulations
Strong understanding of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements including right to deletion, data portability, purpose limitation, and data minimization principles. Knowledge of implementing consent management, privacy impact assessments, and audit trails for regulatory compliance.
System Design and Architecture
Ability to design large-scale systems considering scalability, reliability, maintainability, and security. Experience making architectural tradeoffs, evaluating technology choices, and designing systems that evolve with changing requirements.
Technical Documentation and Communication
Excellent written communication for documenting architecture decisions, RFC processes, and technical specifications. Ability to explain complex system designs to non-technical stakeholders and create clear implementation guides for teams.
Preferred
React and React Native
Nice to haveFrontend framework experience using React for web applications and React Native for mobile development. Understanding of component architecture, state management, and building user experiences that leverage backend APIs effectively.
Observability and Monitoring
Nice to haveHands-on experience with Datadog for metrics, logs, and traces. Understanding of establishing SLOs, alerting strategies, and building observability into systems from design phase. Experience with CloudFlare CDN and security monitoring tools.
CI/CD and DevOps
Nice to haveExperience with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or other continuous integration and deployment platforms. Understanding of automated testing, deployment strategies (blue-green, canary), and infrastructure provisioning automation.
Privacy-by-Design Engineering
Nice to haveTrack record of building systems with privacy and security considerations embedded from inception. Experience with data minimization, purpose limitation, encryption strategies, and privacy-preserving technologies like differential privacy or homomorphic encryption.
Healthcare or Regulated Industry Experience
Nice to havePrior experience working in healthcare, fintech, or other regulated industries. Understanding of compliance requirements, audit processes, and the technical implications of operating in regulated environments with sensitive data.
Distributed Systems
Nice to haveExperience designing and operating distributed systems, including consistency models, replication strategies, and handling network partitions. Understanding of microservices architecture and inter-service communication patterns.
Data Pipeline and ETL Engineering
Nice to haveExperience building and maintaining data pipelines, ETL processes, and data platforms. Understanding of handling data at scale, quality checks, and orchestrating complex data workflows.
English Communication Fluency
Nice to haveFluent English language skills for technical communication, documentation, and cross-functional collaboration. Alan's global operations require strong English communication across distributed teams.
Tech stack
Languages
Frameworks
Databases
Tools
Other
Compensation
Pay and benefits.
Base·EUR 70,000 – 110,000
Full posting
Original listing.
Health can’t wait.
Not for symptoms to get worse. Not for a six‑month appointment. Not for a system to catch up. But that’s exactly how healthcare works today. You wait, until you can’t.
Alan exists to end the wait.
Health is a universal right, and we believe this right can only become real when it’s coupled with prevention. We need to stop treating health as something we repair and start treating it as something we build, every day. It’s not solely a question of willpower. It’s the healthcare system itself that needs to work for everyone, in a sustainable way.
So we are building the new standard in prevention insurance. Alan is the first company that integrates insurance, prevention, and care into a single, acclaimed user experience.
We are on an incredible journey to build a global leading company, with a unique culture. We already partner with 40K+ companies of all sizes, serving more than 1M+ members, and have reached €800M+ in ARR.
Prevention as the new norm. That's what we're building with our team of 800+ people. If it speaks to you: we're hiring across France, Spain, Belgium, and Canada. And beyond.
⭐ The Engineering team ⭐
In our engineering team, we build the infrastructure, interfaces, and applications to provide first-class service to our members, health professionals, and even ourselves!
Being an engineer at Alan means joining a team of talented, committed and passionate engineers, with a lot of interactions.
We move fast, with a lot of ownership, and are proud to tackle big problems!
Our process is very simple: those who make product decisions are the same ones who build them.
We are also the stewards of our members' most sensitive data, and building privacy in by design is core engineering work for us, not an afterthought.
Want to know more? Read this article on our Engineering career path.
🛠️ The Stack
Python/Flask, Typescript, React, React Native on the coding side. AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, Redis, Terraform/Terramate, Datadog, Cloudflare, GitHub Actions on the platform side, all in a monorepo. We deploy daily and believe in distributed ownership - you build it, you own it.
🤖 The Data Foundations crew - within the Tech Foundations area
🎯 Mission
Tech Foundations - enables product crews and creates the environment to thrive, combining world-class infrastructure, intuitive developer experience, exquisite operational excellence, and built-in security to make shipping exceptional products effortless.
Data Foundations - is one of its crews. Its mission: be the enabling and platform team for data lifecycle and privacy engineering across Alan: retention, deletion, anonymization, and pseudonymization, by design. It builds and runs the GDPR Orchestrator (the platform's current embodiment) and equips each area to own its own data rules on top of it. The team also handles data shared with third parties and partners, with Legal and Security on requirements, including authority-facing work (e.g. CNIL).
🔭 Scope
Own and evolve the privacy platform (build & run): its core engine, its safety mechanisms (preview/dry-run, audit trail), and its operational health (deploys, on-call, observability). You design the contract areas build on and keep it reliable as adoption grows.
Build the paved road (enable, teach to fish): docs, templates, and self-serve tooling so any of our 15+ areas can plug into the platform and manage its own data rules and dependencies. You coach areas through pairing and syncs; you build the capability rather than doing the work for them.
Coordinate across areas (the cross-area bridge): align legal, security, data, and the data-producing areas on requirements, surface cross-area data dependencies, and resolve design trade-offs between them. You own the coordination; each area stays accountable for its own data and rules.
Push the foundations forward: drive open platform design questions to a conclusion and grow the platform's capabilities as Alan's data, products, and footprint expand.
👀 Focus for 2026
Own the platform: become the long-term owner of the GDPR Orchestrator and shape the roadmap for how Alan manages data lifecycle at scale.
Raise the bar on the platform: invest in its safety, observability, and developer experience so areas build on it with confidence.
Lay the paved road: ship the docs, templates, and tooling that let areas self-serve, then move ownership of data rules to the areas that produce the data.
Scale the surface: grow the platform's reach across data stores and third-party systems as Alan expands into new countries.
⭐ Is it you we're looking for?
Experience we value
Senior-level experience (typically 8+ years) in backend or platform software engineering, or equivalent, with deep production ownership (API and contract design, data modeling, running what you ship).
You've built and operated platforms, libraries, or services that other engineers depend on, and you care about the contract you expose to them.
You're comfortable operating across many teams and influencing without authoritarianism: getting legal, security, data, and product crews who don't report to you aligned on a plan, and driving it to completion.
You bring pragmatism under constraint: you ship sound, safe solutions and improve them over time, rather than waiting for perfect.
Strong plus: prior privacy, GDPR, or data-governance exposure, and experience working in an enabling or platform-team operating model.
Explicitly not required: deep legal expertise. Legal and security partner with this role; they don't get replaced by it.
Mindset we value
You treat platform engineering as product work: engineers and members are your customers, and doing the right thing with their data should feel effortless.
You're hands-on: writing code is the bulk of the job (Python, TypeScript). You ship what you write to production yourself, then operate it: rollouts, alerting, on-call, incident response.
You design and communicate: you're as comfortable writing a framing doc, drawing a dependency map, and aligning several areas on a design decision as you are writing the code.
You're an enabler: you measure your impact by how fast areas run their own data rules without ever consulting you. The harder you've worked, the less they have to engage you.
You build reusable patterns: guardrails, libraries, and safe-by-default abstractions that keep data handling correct and safe by design at scale.
You're fluent in English (French is not required).
For this opportunity, we are aiming to hire above the E level range.
But above all, we are looking for high potential and curiosity: make sure to show us this when you apply! Everything else is a bonus.
🌍 How we work
Location: You must be legally eligible to work in France, Belgium, or Spain.
Remote work: We offer remote work flexibility, but we value in-person collaboration.
🎯 Important note: we hire people, not roles.
If you're excited about this opportunity but don't check every box, we'd love to hear from you. Everyone, no matter how underrepresented, should feel free to apply, as it can only bring learnings or success.
If you identify yourself as a woman: Did you know that research shows women often apply only when meeting 100% of requirements?
Remember, this is just a guide, not a checklist.
We'll be thrilled to receive your application!
🔖 Check out our About Alan and Career pages, as well as our Medium, blog and Glassdoor page for more info.
You want to know more about Alan?
🙌 Perks & Benefits: Alaners are provided with a stimulating environment and perks ensuring they are happy, efficient and spend only high-quality time with co-workers.
🤘 A strong culture: People joining Alan are often surprised and delighted by our innovative working method. We have a set of cultural values that guide our approach to work.
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