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

The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast

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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Chapters

1. S2E11: Lessons Learned as a Privacy Engineering Manager with Menotti Minutillo (ex-Twitter & Uber) (00:00:00)

2. Introducing Menotti Minutillo (00:01:15)

3. Menotti shares his origin story and found his way to managing privacy engineering teams (00:02:22)

4. Menotti give his definition of a 'privacy engineer' & the skillsets required under this job type as the industry matures (00:06:07)

5. Menotti shares what it's been like to work at Uber and Twitter, which have multiple privacy engineering teams; and best practices for setting up teams & deploying solutions (00:12:39)

6. Why Menotti prefers privacy engineering teams that are multi-disciplinary (00:14:40)

7. The privacy outcomes that privacy engineers should keep top of mind (00:17:23)

8. Menotti shares his views on best practices for privacy architecture (00:23:31)

9. Menotti relays his experience at Uber working with Privacy Researchers (from UC Berkeley) to take differential privacy from the lab to a real-world deployment (00:30:12)

10. Menotti describes lessons learned from working at a company during a transfer of ownership (like Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter) (00:36:01)

11. Debra & Menutti discussed his recent LinkedIn article, "Was Privacy a Zero Interest Rate Bet?" (00:38:29)

12. Menotti gives his assessment on the current outlook for Privacy Engineering roles given the economic climate (00:42:11)

13. Menotti outlines some of the resources he uses to stay current on privacy engineering (00:48:36)