Nishant Bhajaria

Nishant Bhajaria has a Bachelors and a Masters Degree in Computer Science. He has been part of the cybersecurity and privacy community since 2010 and has led teams of various sizes in these areas at Nike, Netflix, Google, and Uber, where he currently leads the privacy engineering organization and reports to the CISO. The organizations he has led have included engineers and architects, data analysts and privacy consultants, as well as product managers and incident response specialists.

After having started his career building teams and programs, he has pivoted to building more strategic programs. These programs operate to enable privacy maturity, partnerships with core engineering and data platform teams, and tighter alignment with the legal and PR teams. His areas of impact range from helping the board of directors make data-driven decisions to coaching product management to operate with fairness and trust as a consideration.

Nishant is also active on the cybersecurity circuit with published white papers on privacy and multiple speaking engagements for industry bodies. He advises startups on data protection strategy and teaches courses on LinkedIn Learning on data privacy (https://www.linkedin.com/learning/instructors/nishant-bhajaria) as well as other areas that include career development and inclusivity in tech staffing. He also partnered with researchers at MIT to draft the first-ever privacy principles for COVID-19 contact tracing (https://law.mit.edu/pub/commentaryoncovid19contacttracingprivacyprinciples/release/1) in the early days of the pandemic.

This eclectic set of contributions map back to his days in college, when he was the rare engineer who wrote editorials for the college paper, was part of the debate team, and worked for political science professors.

Outside of work, there are several causes close to his heart and they center on wildlife. Helping to rescue dogs from kill-shelters, fighting back against wildlife smuggling, and protecting elephants from poaching and abuse serve as his moral purpose.