Ella Park

Ella Park

Building AI for defense. Building defenses for AI agents.

Security Software Engineer · AI Security

Carnegie Mellon University · Information Security

BACKGROUND

Experience

Student Researcher | CyLab (CyLab Autonomous Initiative)

Aug 2026 – Present

Guardrails for autonomous AI agents.

Pittsburgh, PA, USA
  • Develop guardrails for autonomous AI agents to enforce predefined safety policies, preventing sandbox escapes and unauthorized resource access while allowing permitted tasks.

Security Engineer | Megazone Cloud

Dec 2024 – Jun 2026

AI Security, enterprise WAF, CDN architecture, and threat defense.

Seoul, Korea
  • Implemented and evaluated LLM guardrails using AWS Bedrock Guardrails, reducing attack success rates by 85%.
  • Conducted AI threat modeling and red teaming for enterprise GenAI applications, mapping vulnerabilities to MITRE ATLAS and recommending client-specific mitigations.
  • Engineered Akamai CDN and WAF solutions for enterprise clients including Samsung, Coupang, LG, and Hyundai, enhancing CDN performance and fortifying security defense strategies through network traffic analysis.
  • Blocked over 200M malicious requests monthly while recovering 10% revenue leakage by designing a custom Akamai WAF that prevents Bot and DDoS attacks, achieving ≥99.9% service uptime.

Software Engineer Intern | 4DREPLAY

Jul 2023 – Dec 2023

Full-stack groupware and secure microservice architecture.

San Francisco, CA, USA
  • Engineered a full-stack groupware platform using React, TypeScript, Next.js, Spring Boot, and MySQL across three offices, reducing approval turnaround from days to hours.
  • Designed a microservice architecture with REST APIs, least-privilege RBAC, and identity propagation across services handling sensitive employee and financial data.

Software Engineer Intern | TartAI

Sep 2021 – Feb 2022

Full-stack dashboards, APIs, and deployment automation.

Seoul, Korea
  • Developed a real-time investment dashboard with React, TypeScript, and Next.js, reducing initial load by 20% and improving interaction speed.
  • Built a CI/CD pipeline using Python and GitHub Actions across development, staging, and production, reducing release cycles from ~30 minutes to ~5 minutes.
  • Integrated SAST/DAST into pull-request security gates, reducing false positives from 55% to 10%.

MORE TO EXPLORE

Selected projects

CortexWAF expanded AWS architecture

CortexWAF

May 2026 – Jun 2026

Team Leader & Full-Stack Developer · Top Place, AWS × Megazone Cloud Hackathon · 530 participants

GitHub ↗

  • Built a multi-agent AI SOC using Claude Agent SDK, AWS Bedrock, and Step Functions to orchestrate threat analysis and WAF, reducing detection-to-enforcement time from approximately 4 hours to 15 minutes.
  • Developed a LangChain-based RAG pipeline with vector search for WAF rule recommendations, increasing analyst acceptance from 60% to 85% while maintaining a false-positive rate below 1%.
Deep Learning in Malware TLS Classification

Deep Learning in Malware TLS Classification

Mar 2023 – Jul 2023

Deep learning for malware detection in encrypted TLS traffic.

Team Leader & Researcher

  • Utilized ResNet-based CNN and FS-Net-based RNN models with Markov chain fingerprinting to capture sequential TLS message patterns, improving feature extraction and reducing false positives.
  • Awarded 2nd place at the Korea Simulation Academic Conference of the Korea Society for Simulation.
  • Initiated research on malware detection within TLS-encrypted traffic without decryption, achieving more efficient classification than conventional methods.
Eats-Mate, photo 1 Eats-Mate, photo 2 Eats-Mate, photo 3

Single Traveler Application “Eats-Mate”

Jun 2022 – Oct 2022

A full-stack travel application. 3rd place out of 156 teams.

Team Leader & Full-Stack Developer

Frontend code / Backend code

  • Won 3rd place out of 156 teams at the Tourism Startup Contest organized by the Korea Tourism Public Institution & KAKAO.
  • Led development and team coordination, overseeing the project from concept to IR presentation.
  • Directed full-stack development: built a React/Next.js frontend and Spring Boot microservice backend deployed on AWS (EC2, RDS, S3).
University Festival Application "Unifesta"

University Festival Application "Unifesta"

Nov 2021 – Feb 2022

A unified platform for discovering university events.

Full-Stack Developer

  • Developed a unified event management platform enabling users to discover and join university events in real time.
  • Built dynamic user interfaces using React and integrated RESTful APIs developed with Node.js and Express.
  • Deployed the full-stack application on AWS EC2 with Nginx reverse proxy for scalability and fault tolerance.

BEYOND ENGINEERING

Speaking & community

APEC in San Francisco

Nov 2023

One of ten government-sponsored Korean student engineer representatives.

Korean Student Engineer Representative & Speaker

  • Represented Korean student engineers at the Korean Official Summit during APEC, attended by the President of South Korea and government ministers, and shared my story as one of only ten government-sponsored students selected nationwide.

Arduino coding volunteering

Jan 2021 – Jun 2021

Designed and taught a hands-on Arduino curriculum.

Team Leader & Instructor

  • As team leader, planned and organized the entire curriculum, leading the team and coordinating with students to ensure a collaborative and productive learning environment.
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Python coding volunteering

Sep 2020 – Dec 2020

Founded a coding club and taught over 200 elementary students.

Club Founder & Instructor

  • Founded a coding volunteer organization and taught Python Entry coding to over 200 4-grade elementary school students