Ex-Big Tech exec Nishant Bhajaria is set to help build Privado.ai’s Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence
San Francisco, California, Sept. 23, 2024 – Nishant Bhajaria, who has led privacy engineering teams at Google, Netflix, Meta, Uber, and Nike, has joined Privado to form its new Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence (CoE).
As Head of Privacy Engineering CoE, Nishant will advise privacy leaders and Privado customers on how to optimize privacy programs for compliance, software developer efficiency, and customer trust. As Privado continues to build out its industry-first privacy code scanning platform (that helps software engineers identify and reduce privacy risks in their code), Nishant will also advise the Privado product team on new solutions that will help bridge the gap between privacy and engineering teams. Leveraging Nishant’s experience working with stakeholders across functions, Privado will accelerate its strategy to reduce privacy risk for companies building software that processes personal data.
Over his career, Nishant has pioneered the technical privacy playbook to scale privacy compliance and turn privacy into a business driver. At Meta, he redesigned internal settings to improve user consent experiences. At Uber, he helped the company build consumer trust by building the Uber Privacy Center. When such an endeavor may have been thought to be expensive to build and manage, Nishant efficiently repurposed internal dashboards to power a privacy center that reduced the number of data requests instead of increasing them.
Nishant Bhajaria
“I’ve been extremely impressed with Privado’s new approach to privacy compliance that promotes innovation, instead of hinders it,” Nishant said, “For software-driven companies, data flows through their infrastructure like fire through dry grass fueled by code, yet privacy and engineering teams often lack visibility into how their software moves data. Many privacy teams try to fill this gap by asking engineers to complete questionnaires, but these manual assessments do not scale, and never will. Privado has helped address this gap by scanning code to continuously monitor data flows and proactively identify risks. I’m excited to join the amazing team at Privado and help more privacy and engineering leaders implement solutions that enable, rather than block, engineers.”
Privado CEO Vaibhav Antil explained why the time is now for this hire: “Nishant is an extraordinary leader and one of the pioneers in privacy engineering. His deep experience in managing privacy at the world’s most scrutinized tech companies makes him uniquely positioned to drive our vision forward. We’ve been planning the launch of our Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence for some time, but we knew we needed the right person to build it. With Nishant’s proven track record in solving complex privacy challenges at scale, we are confident that he will help shape the future of privacy engineering and strengthen our ability to serve our customers.”
Nishant brings to this initiative 10+ years of leading privacy and security engineering teams and 10+ years as a software engineer and product manager. He leveraged his unique cross-functional privacy engineering approach to mitigate risk at scale for Meta, Google, Netflix, Uber, and Nike. He is the author of Data Privacy: A runbook for engineers and an accomplished educator. As an adjunct professor at his alma mater Arizona State University and Portland State University, Nishant teaches courses on data governance and Generative AI. He also teaches on LinkedIn Learning with courses on security, privacy, and career management.
For Privado, this initiative comes as privacy regulation is ramping up in the US. During 2024, the California Attorney General and FTC have already fined multiple companies for non-compliant personal data sharing1, and enforcement has begun for two major privacy laws: the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and Washington state’s My Health My Data Act (MHMDA). With the added scrutiny on data privacy, companies are grappling with data quality issues and business inefficiencies.
Privado is keen to help companies proactively address privacy compliance with its privacy code scanning platform that provides full data visibility and continuous privacy governance. With AI enabling new levels of accuracy and automation, Privado believes now is the time for Nishant to help bring privacy code scanning to the enterprise market.
