S2E11: Lessons Learned as a Privacy Engineering Manager with Menotti Minutillo (ex-Twitter & Uber)

This week, we gain insights into the profession of privacy engineering with guest Menotti Minutillo, a Sr. Privacy Engineering Manager with 15+ years of experience leading critical programs and product delivery at companies like Uber, Thrive Global & Twitter. He started his career in 2007 on Wall Street as a DevOps & Infrastructure Engineer; and now, Menotti is a sought-after technical privacy expert and Privacy Tech Advisor. In this conversation, we discuss privacy engineering approaches that have work, the skillsets required for privacy engineering, and the current climate for landing privacy engineering roles.

Menotti sees privacy engineering as the practice of building or improving info systems to advance a set of privacy goals. It's like a 'layer cake' in that you have different protections and risk reductions based on threat modeling, as well as different specialization capabilities for larger orgs.

It makes a lot of sense that he's held weaving roles from company to company. His journey into privacy engineering was originally 'adjacent work' and today, he shares lessons learned from taking a PET like differential privacy from the lab to systematizing it into an organization to deploying it in the real-world. In this episode, we delve into tools, technical processes, technical standards, the maturing landscape for privacy engineers, and how the success of privacy is coupled with the success of each product shipped.

Topics Covered:

• How Menotti found his way to managing privacy engineering teams
• Menotti's definition of 'privacy engineer' & the skillsets required
• What it was like to work at Uber & Twitter, which have multiple privacy engineering teams
• Best practices for setting up teams & deploying solutions
• Privacy outcomes that privacy engineers should keep top of mind
• Best practices for privacy architecture
• Menotti positive experience while at Uber working with Privacy Researchers from UC Berkeley to take differential privacy from the lab to a real-world deployment
• Lessons learned from times of transition, including while at Twitter during Musk's takeover 
• Whether privacy was a 'zero interest rate bet,' and what that means for privacy engineering roles given current economic realities

Resources Mentioned:

• Check out the PEPR conference
• Read 'Was Privacy a Zero Interest Rate Bet?'

Guest Info:

• Follow Menotti on LinkedIn
• Connect with Menotti on Mastadon

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