Privacy Engineer - Top Interview Questions

What is the role of a privacy engineer?

Privacy engineers create technical solutions and design processes that help companies mitigate privacy risks and meet regulations. A privacy engineer does a variety of functions. Contrary to the technical title, not all their responsibilities are purely technical. Some of the responsibilities include:

• Privacy by Design
  Create frameworks and processes for developers to implement ‘privacy by design’ in their products.
• Measuring Privacy
  Measure privacy using privacy metrics
• Privacy vs. Business Value
  Help teams understand tradeoff metrics privacy vs. accuracy. implement differential privacy
• Develop Solutions
  Building APIs and microservices to implement regulatory requirements such as data subject requests, legal holds, and anonymizing personal data

Privacy Engineer Interview Questions

The interview will include some basic privacy-related questions. Depending on the type of the role, the interview might include more technical questions. Most likely, the interview will have a few case questions that include some practical questions.

Basics

• What is ‘Privacy by Design’?
• Name some of the ‘Privacy by Design’ principles.
• What is the difference between security and privacy?
• What are privacy assessments?

Technical Questions

• What are the ways of de-identification?
• Explain technical terms:
  - Differential Privacy
  - Federated Learning
  - Fingerprinting
  - k-anonymity
  - End to End Encryption

User Experience, Customer Empathy

• How do you ensure User transparency?
• Will you recommend opt-in or opt-out user consent? why?
• What questions will you ask developers and product managers to ensure privacy by design?

Case Questions

The goal of a case question is to have a dialog about a real-world problem related to privacy. Example case interview questions

• Review a site or a product (could be real or imaginative). Could you point out any privacy flaws? How to improve?
• Business analysts want to use data that contains personal information. Can you design a system to anonymize user data? how to do you determine what needs to be anonymized?