Kavel Rao

I am a BS/MS computer science student and NASA Space Grant scholar at the University of Washington. In Fall 2023, I went for an exchange semester at ETH Zurich, where I took classes on programming languages and computer architecture and traveled around Europe. My interests are in using software and AI for social good, and I’m always exploring to find more areas and applications that call to me!

I have two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2024! Check out WildGuard and WildTeaming for works on LLM jailbreaking, safety, and guardrails.

After graduating, I will be a software engineer at Databricks, where I also interned in the summer of 2024. In the summer of 2023, I was an intern in Stripe’s risk organization, improving tools for risk analysts to investigate suspicious merchants on the platform. From 2020 to 2022, I worked as a software engineering intern at Conversica, where I built platforms powering AI model operations, including natural language understanding and generation.

Some of my hobbies are rock climbing, reading (follow me on Storygraph), and hiking (read my WTA trip reports).