Karla Burnett
hello@karla.io

Staff Software Engineer

Tech lead: Context-Aware Data Access

Led a project to rearchitect the database query layer to prevent insecure direct object reference vulnerabilites. Found and patched more than a dozen existing vulnerabilities, and handed the project off, allowing it to complete successfully while I was on parental leave.

Tech lead: Security squad

Led a project to ensure that commands run against production infrastructure during incidents were appropriately logged and access controlled. Led a cross-functional team of senior engineers to develop a containerized solution allowing arbitrary code execution for critical incident remediation, while also enforcing security controls and meeting regulatory requirements.

Tech lead: User Security

Led a team responsible for authentication and authorization of site users. Rewrote the entire authorization stack to support SAML integrations for enterprise users, converted onboarding flows from Backbone to React, allowing new regulatory requirements to be fulfilled easily, and built account takeover protections and detections that dropped losses by 50%.

Tech lead: Data Products

Tech lead on a greenfield project of six engineers to add user-facing reporting functionality to the site. Developed the initial alpha and beta versions of Stripe Sigma, unlocking an entirely new reporting product line for the company, while also scaling and maintaining a large Elasticsearch cluster, going from once a month incidents to the ability to scalably increase capacity.

Security

Focused on application security: re-wrote the site's user and session authentication layers, created new rate limiting infrastructure that has scaled through 30x growth, orchestrated and ran internal phishing tests that changed the company's stance from focusing on training to focusing on technical defenses.

Course Co-ordinator and Tutor, Computing 1

Organised five different tutorials for fifty high school students to take UNSW's first semester computer science course, teaching one of these groups myself. Students had differing levels of experience, from complete beginners to members of the Australian Informatics team. Responsible for marking assessments and exams, planning and running whole-course tutorials, and encouraging students in computer science activities.

Taste of Research Summer Scholar, Verification

Developed a tool for trace refinement based software verification. The tool would process a simple C-like language, intelligently calculating paths to explore, to determine whether a post-condition would hold given a certain pre-condition.