Katharine Jarmul is a privacy activist, machine learning engineer, and Principal Data Scientist at Thoughtworks Germany. Over her career she has held numerous roles at large companies and startups in the US and Germany, implementing data processing and machine learning systems with a focus on reliability, testability, privacy, and security. Her path into privacy engineering began in data journalism and natural language processing and later included startup work at KI Protect alongside enterprise machine learning projects.

Today Katharine specializes in privacy-preserving machine learning: differential privacy, federated learning, and other privacy-enhancing technologies, together with the regulatory landscape that shapes them, from GDPR to CCPA and CPRA. She works with teams on the hard practical questions, including consent design, common anonymization pitfalls, pseudonymisation, and how to build personalization features that respect users instead of profiling them.

Katharine is also a book author, and her recent book on practical data privacy distills years of hands-on experience into actionable guidance for engineering teams. As a speaker and educator on privacy engineering, data minimization, and responsible AI, she helps organizations build machine learning systems that are both useful and worthy of user trust.