Hi 👋, I'm Mark Ballew

DevOps Engineer | AI Safety Researcher | Web3 Builder

🚀 About Me

🏆 ETHDenver 2025 Winner - Won $4,500 with TrustDAI, a decentralized AI trust and verification system
🔬 AI Safety Researcher - Specialized in AI evaluation frameworks and GPU cluster deployment for threat research
🛡️ Security & Identity Expert - 15+ years in large-scale automation, DevOps, and security, specializing in decentralized identity and human-agent verification systems
🌱 Currently Building - AI Safety testing framework for Web3 AI agents. Evaluate and monitor agent workflows for unauthorized actions, misalignment, and wallet use
🎪 At EthRome Oct 2025 - Looking for smart contract developers for Web3 AI Agent evaluation and monitoring
💡 Research Interests - AI agent frameworks, decentralized identity (DID), privacy-preserving data storage, and Web3-AI convergence

🎪 EthRome Oct 2025

Building: AI Safety testing framework for Web3 agents
Looking for: Solidity developers experienced with test chains and agent interactions
My role: Infrastructure, AI agents, evaluation framework integration

What we're building: Automated testing framework that catches dangerous agent behaviors (unauthorized transactions, misalignment, wallet misuse) in simulated environments before production deployment.

🔧 Current Focus

AI Safety Testing for Web3: Building automated safety evaluation framework for Web3 AI agents using UK AISI's Inspect. Test agent workflows in simulated blockchain environments - catching unauthorized actions, misalignment, and dangerous wallet behaviors before production deployment.

Key Technologies:

AI Safety: UK AISI's Inspect framework, Weights & Biases for evaluation tracking
Agent Frameworks: LangChain for agent orchestration and testing
Blockchain Testing: Foundry, Hardhat, simulated test chains
Infrastructure: Kubernetes, OpenTofu/Terraform, Spacelift for CI/CD, AWS/Azure
Data Storage: Arweave, Ocean Protocol, IPFS with encryption

💼 Experience Highlights

METR - Open-sourced Inspect-Action (Inspect extension for Kubernetes GPU clusters) with Terraform and Python, architected EKS deployments for AI threat research
UC Berkeley MyShake - Migrated legacy infrastructure to IaC, reduced bugs by 99%, built CI/CD pipelines
Okta - Built security DevOps team, implemented PKI audit infrastructure discovering 50%+ idle admin accounts, created automated certificate management systems
15+ years in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and security automation

📊 GitHub Stats

🏆 Achievements

📊 99% Bug Reduction - Infrastructure migration at UC Berkeley
🔒 Major Security Improvements - PKI infrastructure and automated certificate management at Okta
🚀 Open Source Contributor - Co-founder of Chatresearch (700+ member non-profit) and VHSpace.org
⚡ Infrastructure Optimization - Reduced deployment times from months to days through automated CI/CD