Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Publications
Timeline
Generic

Lauren Guerra

Palo Alto

Summary

Accomplished Machine Learning & Security Engineer with expertise in reinforcement learning, adversarial model evaluation, and NLP-driven behavioral analysis. Extensive experience in AI-driven threat detection, anomaly detection, and scalable security architectures, leading research and development of RL-based exploit detection frameworks (Z-Hunter) and advancing AI model robustness in adversarial settings. Proven ability to design and deploy large-scale ML-driven security solutions with direct applications to model personalization and behavior shaping.

Overview

9
9
years of professional experience

Work History

Staff Software Engineer — Machine Learning & Threat Intelligence Lead

Cloudflare
01.2023 - Current
  • Designed and developed Z-Hunter, an AI-driven framework for zero-day exploit detection, integrating Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), Genetic Algorithms (GA), and adversarial training to proactively predict and mitigate emerging threats
  • Applied reinforcement learning-based model behavior shaping techniques to enhance adversarial detection, optimizing reward structures and training feedback loops for AI robustness
  • Built scalable evaluation pipelines leveraging Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) and reinforcement learning-based anomaly detection, aligning with techniques used for model behavior shaping and AI personality control
  • Designed synthetic exploit generation mechanisms, analogous to synthetic data generation in AI fine-tuning, improving Z-Hunter's generalization against adversarial AI-generated attacks
  • Applied reinforcement learning-based model behavior shaping techniques to enhance adversarial detection, optimizing reward structures and training feedback loops for AI robustness in security logs, improving AI-driven decision-making in real-time threat assessment

Senior Software Engineer — Infrastructure → Head of Security

Quora
05.2021 - 09.2022
  • Led Incident Response & Public Readiness, ensuring compliance and executing LLM-driven threat detection strategies
  • Developed a Detection & Response Pipeline, optimizing anomaly detection via machine learning models to enhance model behavior evaluation
  • Designed and implemented re-authentication systems to combat replay attacks, integrating RL-based decision-making to prevent AI-driven adversarial exploits
  • Directed encryption and GDPR compliance enhancements, ensuring privacy-aware AI model deployments
  • Oversaw network security and automated allowlist auditing, applying NLP clustering for anomaly detection in access patterns

Software Engineer - Security

Google
06.2018 - 09.2020
  • Founding member of BrainAuth, Google's first dedicated ML Security team, pioneering the application of machine learning to security threats
  • Developed ML models to detect anomalous human command-line interactions, reconstructing process trees from raw kernel logs to uncover reconnaissance and lateral movement activities
  • Applied Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to detect inappropriate document access, leveraging user context and document metadata to model expected behavior
  • Created a novel anomaly detection pipeline using crossings of user behavior and document sensitivity, training a neural network to identify access anomalies indicative of insider threats
  • Designed interactive process execution classification models, completed Unix-based implementations, and initiated Windows deployment for broad-scale anomaly detection
  • Developed behavioral anomaly detection models to identify irregular execution sequences, applying methodologies analogous to AI model auditing in LLMs to detect deviations from expected behavior to support digital forensics teams

Data Scientist

Postmates
01.2017 - 06.2018
  • Built an NLP-based fraud detection model leveraging reinforcement learning reward mechanisms, reducing fraudulent activities by 8%
  • Designed automated ML pipelines for ranking customer service complaints, applying AI-driven severity classification
  • Developed a cost-estimation parser that saved over $17,000 per month by improving transaction forecasting accuracy

Data Scientist

LinkedIn
09.2015 - 12.2016
  • Led data science efforts for large-scale AI crawlers, designing language-agnostic NLP models to extract and normalize structured data
  • Built a stochastic anomaly detection system for production web data ingestion, leveraging automated ML-based anomaly flagging
  • Created profile fraud detection models using graph-based entity recognition and AI-driven reputation scoring

Education

Bachelor of Science - Mathematics

University of California
06-2015

Skills

  • Machine Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Deep Q-Networks (DQN)
  • POMDP modeling
  • Adversarial RL
  • Reward Prediction Error (RPE)
  • Security
  • Anomaly Detection
  • AI-driven IDS
  • Threat Intelligence
  • NLP-based adversarial detection
  • Automated anomaly classification
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • Clustering techniques
  • Synthetic adversarial data generation
  • Behavioral AI modeling
  • System Optimization
  • AI Model Evaluation
  • AI behavior tuning
  • Large-scale ML deployment
  • Scalable RL-based decision model
  • Model Behavior Evaluation
  • Reinforcement learning-based tuning
  • Synthetic data-driven model assessments
  • Adversarial robustness testing
  • LLM model personalization techniques
  • AI Training Pipelines
  • Automated fine-tuning workflows
  • Reward signal optimization
  • AI-guided reinforcement loop evaluation

Publications

Betti numbers of order preserving graph homomorphisms, Involve: a Journal of Mathematics, 5-1, 2012, 67-80, Steven Klee

Timeline

Staff Software Engineer — Machine Learning & Threat Intelligence Lead

Cloudflare
01.2023 - Current

Senior Software Engineer — Infrastructure → Head of Security

Quora
05.2021 - 09.2022

Software Engineer - Security

Google
06.2018 - 09.2020

Data Scientist

Postmates
01.2017 - 06.2018

Data Scientist

LinkedIn
09.2015 - 12.2016

Bachelor of Science - Mathematics

University of California

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Lauren Guerra