kartikeya sharma
Differential privacy · Applied cryptography · Verifiable computation
HOMEABOUTRESEARCHPROJECTSWRITINGRESUME

Experience

BHAG Labs, Inc.Delhi, India
FounderJun 2026 - Present
  • Designing SPOT (Sampled Proofs Over Turns), a session-level protocol in which each model response carries a signed receipt bound to a published weight commitment, with a subset verified by zero-knowledge proofs
  • Built a proof pipeline over multi-hour GPU workloads on NASA-ISRO NISAR radar data: a RISC Zero zkVM guest re-executing a Fiat-Shamir residual check, wrapped in Groth16 for on-chain verification, with Intel TDX attestation over the off-chain engine
  • Audited that pipeline and found the Fiat-Shamir seed committed only to public inputs. Built a working forgery to prove that the sampled column set is computable in advance
Paytm Payments Services LimitedNoida, India
Assistant ManagerMar 2026 - Jun 2026
  • First hire in a new vertical, building and teaching fintech and AI capstone projects for MBA and BTech students
  • Collaborated with Paytm's CISO, security leads, and staff engineers to develop 90+ hours of session plans across AI/ML, cybersecurity, and blockchain
  • Delivered 60 hours of capstone teaching to third-semester BTech students at Chitkara University as the sole Paytm point of contact on site, and ran the weekly delivery cadence with our EdTech partner
Tumeryk, Inc.Remote
AI Security EngineerNov 2025 - Mar 2026
  • Built the probe taxonomies and evaluation harnesses (Garak, AgentDojo) for LLM-as-judge safety evaluation, measuring that attack-pass rates on identical probes ranged from 6% to 91% depending only on the judge model
  • Designed, deployed and operated the seven-model production guardrail suite those evaluations governed, cutting mean moderation latency 58% (1342 ms to 560 ms) on vLLM and bias false positives from 25% to 2%
  • Developed the MITRE ATLAS to NIST SP 800-53 mapping that grounded formal public comments on the draft NIST IR 8596
Grant Thornton BharatGurugram, India
Cyber & IT Risk InternSep 2025 - Oct 2025
  • Executed grey-box penetration testing of a blockchain-based web application (OWASP Testing Guide v4), identifying exposed admin panels and missing security headers
  • Performed VAPT assessments across 125+ subdomains for a public-sector bank; authored a TPRM report for an HDFC Ergo vendor with risk observations and remediation recommendations
Python for HumanistsRemote
Founder and InstructorJan 2025 - Aug 2025
  • Free, open-access platform teaching Python and pandas to students outside computer science, designed from a needs analysis of 49 CCNY undergraduates
  • Companion course of more than 25 videos with over 200 hours of watch time
City College of New York, CUNYNew York, NY
Adjunct Lecturer, Computer ScienceAug 2024 - May 2025
  • Primary instructor for CSc 10800, Foundations of Data Science, teaching more than 90 students across two semesters
Research Foundation of CUNYNew York, NY
Graduate Research Assistant (NSF PFI-RP)May 2024 - Apr 2025
  • Produced the threat model for a privacy-sensitive support application used by victims of intimate partner violence, mapping the HITS screening instrument onto NIST SP 800-53 controls and routine activity theory
  • Analysed the privacy and data-leakage risks of more than 150 domestic violence applications
  • Engineered and evaluated prompt strategies across GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and LLaMA for HITS-based risk classification, identifying per-model failure modes in automated diagnosis
AXI Systems, Inc.New York, NY
Software EngineerJun 2021 - Aug 2022
  • Cut backend query latency by over 30% with a caching layer in Python, Django, and Redis
  • Shipped compliance-reporting features covering more than 4,000 firm records
City College of New York, CUNYNew York, NY
ORCA Research FellowJun 2020 - Aug 2020
  • Compiled the NHANES clinical dataset from a decade of public releases with rigorous data validation
  • Trained Random Forest and Support Vector Machine classifiers to predict Type-2 diabetes, reaching 85% accuracy
Dype, Inc.New York, NY
Technical Lead & Co-FounderMar 2019 - Jun 2021
  • Built and scaled a sneaker authentication platform (React Native + Firebase) from 0 to 11,000 monthly active users generating $46,000 in revenue; dypeapp.com
  • Led Agile team of 3 from mockups to production with full CI/CD

Projects

ZK-RollupsApplied Cryptography
Zero-Knowledge Rollup ImplementationCircom, SnarkJS, zkutil
  • Implemented arithmetic circuits in Circom and generated zero-knowledge proofs with SnarkJS for a rollup construction that batches transactions behind a single validity proof
  • Verified proofs with zkutil; foundation from graduate cryptography under Prof. Rosario Gennaro (Modern Cryptography: A, Cryptography and Secure Communication: A)
M.Sc. CapstoneResearch
Privacy-Preserving ML with Class ImbalancePython, TensorFlow-Privacy, DP-SGD
  • Achieved 0.9168 AUC at ε=0.337 on NHANES health data under DP-SGD with per-example L2 clipping and calibrated Gaussian noise, across an 810-configuration grid search
  • Proposed AdaptiveClipAndNoise, a fairness-aware clipping method; adaptive evaluation is stated future work
UEBA SystemAI in Cybersecurity
Insider Threat DetectionPython, Keras, LSTM/Bi-LSTM, Django
  • Trained LSTM and Bi-LSTM models on 100 GB of enterprise security logs to detect anomalous user behavior
  • Achieved 97.3% accuracy in insider threat classification with a full-stack Django interface
Security AnalysisSystems Security
Voting Machine Security AnalysisRust
  • Designed a voting machine prototype with embedded backdoors to demonstrate election-manipulation attack surfaces
  • Performed red team analysis identifying critical vulnerabilities in integrity controls

Affiliations

CUNY Startups
Student Advisory Board2024 - 2025
  • Advised on startup ecosystem strategy and mentored early-stage student founders across CUNY campuses
Zahn Innovation Center
Judge2024
  • Evaluated and provided feedback on student startup pitches at CCNY's Zahn Innovation Center
ACM CS & Law Workshop at MIT CSAIL
Attendee (NSF-supported)2024
  • Received NSF Support Grant to attend workshop on the intersection of Computer Science and Law
The City College of New York
Co-Founder, Crypto (Blockchain) Club2018 - 2019
  • Organized workshops and managed large-scale speaker events for IBM and ConsenSys directors
  • Oversaw club operations with 120+ members

Education

City College of New York (CUNY)
M.Sc. in Cybersecurity
New York, NY | Jan 2025
  • Capstone: Adaptive Clipping and Noise Techniques for Privacy-Preserving ML with Class Imbalance
City College of New York (CUNY)
B.Sc. in Computer Science, Magna Cum Laude
New York, NY | Jun 2021
  • Capstone: Decentralized Voter Analytics using Hypercube Networks and Heterogeneous Databases

Skills

Cryptography & Verifiable Compute

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (Groth16, Circom, SnarkJS), RISC Zero zkVM, TEE Attestation (Intel TDX), Fiat-Shamir Protocols, MPC Key Custody, Proxy Re-encryption (NuCypher), Differential Privacy (DP-SGD)

Blockchain & Decentralized Systems

Ethereum, ERC-721 (Base), ERC-4337 Gas Abstraction, IPFS, Arweave (Irys), ENS

AI Safety & Evaluation

LLM Guardrails, Prompt Injection Detection, Jailbreak Detection, AI Red Teaming (Garak, AgentDojo), Safety Moderation, LLM-as-a-Judge, PII Detection, Adversarial ML

ML & Serving

vLLM, PyTorch, TensorFlow (TensorFlow-Privacy), Hugging Face, Scikit-learn, RAG, Prompt Engineering

Standards & Compliance

NIST AI RMF, NIST IR 8596, EU AI Act, ISO 42001, NIST SP 800-53, MITRE ATLAS, OWASP Top 10

Languages & Infrastructure

Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, Rust, SQL, C/C++, GCP (GPU orchestration, spot instances), Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, CI/CD

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