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

Runtime observability and defense for autonomous AI agents.

Pittsburgh, PA, USA
  • Develop an observability and defense platform using Python, OpenTelemetry, React, and Docker for autonomous agents, enabling runtime telemetry, custom policy enforcement, and trajectory-based behavior detection and response.

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 team at the Megazone hackathon award ceremony Megathon 2026 participants at the AWS and Megazone Cloud hackathon

CortexWAF

May 2026 – Jun 2026

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

GitHub ↗ / Architecture ↗

  • 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 youth representatives.

Korean Youth Representative & Speaker

  • Represented Korean youth 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.
Python coding volunteering, photo 1 Python coding volunteering, photo 2 Python coding volunteering, photo 3

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