Former Big Tech Executive, Nishant Bhajaria will head Privado’s Privacy Engineering Centre of Excellence after working for Google, Netflix, Meta, Uber, and Nike. Bhajaria has oversaw privacy departments at Nike, Google, Netflix, Meta, and Uber.
The hiring of Bhajaria coincides with increased privacy enforcement in the US, where several businesses are subject to regulatory action while Privado develops its technology to identify privacy concerns in code. Leading privacy engineering teams at Google, Netflix, Meta, Uber, Nike, and other companies, Bhajaria has joined Privado to head the company’s new Privacy Engineering Centre of Excellence (CoE).
In his capacity as Head of Privacy Engineering CoE, Bhajaria will counsel privacy executives and Privado clients on how to maximise privacy initiatives for regulatory compliance, developer productivity, and client confidence.
Bhajaria will provide guidance to the Privado product team on novel approaches to facilitate communication between the privacy and engineering teams while the company works to expand its pioneering privacy code scanning platform, which assists software engineers in recognizing and mitigating privacy hazards within their code.
Using Bhajaria’s background of collaborating with stakeholders from several functional areas, Privado will expedite its approach to lower privacy risks for businesses developing software that handles personal data. He has developed the technical privacy playbook over his career to expand privacy compliance and make privacy a commercial driver. He changed internal settings at Meta to enhance the user consent process.
By creating the Uber Privacy Centre, he assisted Uber in gaining the trust of its customers. While it would have been assumed that such an undertaking would be costly to develop and oversee, Bhajaria skillfully reused internal dashboards to power a privacy centre that decreased rather than increased the number of data requests.
According to him: “I’ve been extremely impressed with Privado’s new approach to privacy compliance that promotes innovation, instead of hinders it.”
He went on to say: “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,” Nishant added.
Vaibhav Antil, CEO of Privado, outlined the following reasons this appointment is necessary: “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 lead 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,” the CEO added.
Bhajaria has been a software engineer for ten years and has led teams in privacy and security engineering for more than ten years before joining Privado. He used his distinct cross-functional approach to privacy engineering to reduce risk for companies like Nike, Google, Netflix, Uber, and Meta at a large scale, BrandSpur technology and information news reports.
In addition to being a skilled teacher, he is the author of Data Privacy: A Runbook for Engineers. Nishant conducts classes on data governance and generative AI as an adjunct professor at his alma mater, Arizona State University, as well as Portland State University. In addition, he offers courses on security, privacy, and career management on LinkedIn Learning.
Bhajaria’s employment aligns with the US’s escalating privacy regulations. The California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) and the My Health My Data Act (MHMDA) of Washington state are two significant pieces of privacy legislation whose enforcement started in 2024. The California Attorney General and the Federal Trade Commission have already punished numerous corporations for exchanging personal data in violation of these rules.
Businesses are struggling with data quality problems and operational inefficiencies as a result of the increased scrutiny surrounding data privacy. With its privacy code scanning technology, which offers complete data visibility and ongoing privacy governance, Privado is eager to assist businesses in proactively addressing privacy compliance.
Privado, however, thinks Nishant should assist in introducing privacy code scanning into the enterprise market since AI is opening up new possibilities for automation and accuracy.
