Raja Dheekonda
Distinguished Software Engineer at Dreadnode
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRaja Dheekonda is a Distinguished Software Engineer with seven years of experience building and scaling AI-driven security systems across Azure, AWS, and GCP. He was the first engineer on Microsoft’s AI Red Team, where he led development of widely used open-source tools like PyRIT, Counterfit, and PickleScan to assess and harden generative and traditional AI models. Raja has architected enterprise products such as Microsoft Defender for AI and large-scale threat intelligence pipelines that analyze petabytes of network flow data to protect millions of customers. His work spans hands-on model fine-tuning and deployment to capacity planning, adversarial detection research (including a co-invented patent), and productizing AI safety at scale. Prior to Microsoft he built risk models and optimized Spark-based ML pipelines for Morningstar, demonstrating a strong blend of financial analytics and large-scale engineering. Based in Bellevue, he combines deep systems-level expertise (Python, C#, Java, Spark) with a knack for turning cutting-edge research into practical, production-ready security tools.
7 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University HyderabadMaster’s Degree Computer and Information Sciences, Master’s Degree Computer and Information Sciences at Purdue University
Github Skills (6)
generative-ai10
security9
cli9
machine-learning8
python8
automation7
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
rdheekonda/PyRIT
Feb 2024 - Feb 2025
The Python Risk Identification Tool for generative AI (PyRIT) is an open access automation framework to empower security professionals and machine learning engineers to proactively find risks in their generative AI systems.
Contributions:163 pushes, 42 branches in 11 months
Azure/counterfit
Jul 2021 - Nov 2022
a CLI that provides a generic automation layer for assessing the security of ML models
Contributions:51 reviews, 11 commits, 17 PRs in 1 year 4 months
ml-modelspythonsecuritymachine-learninggeneric
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