Varenya Sri Mudumba

Research Intern

Corelight

Built a self-supervised multi-agent system (Claude on Amazon Bedrock) that reverse-engineers and statically analyzes malware through a custom 23-tool MCP server (Ghidra, radare2, capa, FLOSS, androguard) to auto-generate per-family YARA rules, with guardrails isolating the agent from the raw malware. By iteratively analyzing agent transcripts and revising the system's prompting and tool orchestration, I advanced its capabilities to raise detection coverage from 40-60% to 80-98% and cut cost from ~$10 to ~$4 per family run, across a ~38K-sample corpus (138 malware families, 6 file types).

Graduate Researcher

Texas A&M University, Dr. Marcus Botacin's Lab

Researching streaming algorithms for malware analysis, designing and evaluating novel and hybrid detection methods that make YARA rule generation faster and more efficient.

Student Research Assistant

Texas A&M University, Dept. of Soil & Crop Sciences

Collaborating with the GAIA research group on digital agricultural challenges. I scale transfer learning models to analyze multi spectral soil data, leveraging High-Performance Computing (HPRC) clusters to process environmental data for precision agriculture, bridging the gap between deep learning research and practical, impactful application.

Software Development Engineer

Zscaler, Hyderabad, India

I played a pivotal role in supporting and enhancing our quality assurance infrastructure, joining a dedicated effort to build a custom Pytest-based monitoring system that runs over 900 daily regression tests. My contributions helped ensuring this system remained the backbone of our release cycle, catching regressions hours after code commits rather than days.

Beyond testing, I optimized our cloud infrastructure provisioning. By successfully integrating Terraform and Ansible automation into our team's workflow, I reduced the environment setup time from 18 hours to just 3, effectively unblocking the development team and accelerating our sprint velocity. I also championed high code quality, conducting rigorous reviews for over 70 PRs to ensure security and maintainability.

Associate Software Developer Engineer

Zscaler, Hyderabad, India

I focused on architectural consolidation and feature integration. I successfully migrated legacy modules into a unified, modern framework, which reduced technical debt and maintenance overhead by nearly 50%.

I also acted as a bridge between the Zscaler Private Access (ZPA) core team and internal application teams, integrating secure access features that were adopted by over 7 distinct internal groups, streamlining secure connectivity across the organization.

Software Developer Intern

Zscaler, Bangalore, India

During my internship, I automated the setup of our simulation environments ("sim-boxes") on AWS. I automated the lifecycle management of EC2 instances and secure storage via S3 and Secrets Manager, making the process 12 times faster.

As they say, "you can't fix what you can't see," so I worked on our monitoring, using Kibana and OpenSearch to surface over 1,000 system metrics and help the team catch performance bottlenecks we'd previously been missing.

Software Developer Intern

Athen Tech India, Hyderabad, India

Built a customer-facing chatbot from scratch using JavaScript in an era where there were no AI agent chatbots. Designed state-machine based conversation flows and integrated with backend APIs to offload routine queries from the support team, successfully resolving over 60% of common issues without human intervention.

Cross-Cultural Team Collaboration

Professional & Academic

At Zscaler, I collaborated closely with distributed engineering teams across Bangalore, Hyderabad, and the US, navigating time zones, aligning on technical specs, and shipping features together. I served as the integration point between the ZPA core team and 7 internal application groups, which meant a lot of async communication, clear documentation, and building trust across organizational boundaries.

At Texas A&M, I work alongside researchers and faculty from diverse international backgrounds within the GAIA group. Whether it's calibrating expectations on research timelines or aligning on ML experiment designs, I've found that the most productive collaborations happen when everyone feels heard, and I actively try to create that environment.

Class Representative

NIT Durgapur, Dept. of CSE

Led a cohort of 190+ students across 4 semesters, coordinating between faculty and students, resolving academic conflicts, and representing the class in departmental meetings. This wasn't just an admin role; it was about being the person people came to when something wasn't working, and figuring out how to fix it together.