Juliette Pluto

Enterprising engineer with a penchant for pragmatic work on complex research problems.

j@jul.sh

Experience

Google DeepMind | Staff Software Engineer (L6) | 2020-04 to Present | NYC

(Promoted to Staff in 2026; Senior in 2024)

• Agentic Safety Evaluations: Started GDM's first effort to defend against prompt injection and established the core security evaluation bundle used directly by GenAI leadership for frontier model selection. Expanded adversarial evaluation coverage across critical production agentic surfaces: Workspace, Cloud, and Search.
• Gemini Prompt Injection Robustness Strategy: Originated and socialized a novel mitigation strategy for adaptive prompt injection robustness, overcoming initial resistance and securing resourcing for implementation; applying the strategy under the same data budget delivered a 5x improvement on an internal automated red-teaming benchmark used as a team OKR.
• Data-Centric Robustness Mitigations: Selected by leadership to close a critical prompt injection robustness gap for a multi-billion-dollar enterprise contract. Analyzed failure modes and targeted training distributions, doubling robustness on an internal benchmark; advised the customer's Head of ML Safety and helped secure final acceptance.
• Defensive Architecture: Invented the User Instruction Classifier, an early policy-based defense achieving 99.97% robustness against adaptive prompt injection attacks on the team's internal benchmark; the technique was subsequently adopted to improve resilience against human red-teaming in production safety systems.
• Cross-Organizational Threat Intelligence: Discovered unaddressed attack surfaces in Google Search ahead of organizational awareness; directed a cross-org technical response executed by 4 FTEs and co-authored sections of the Google-wide Prompt Injection Playbook.
• Systems Security & Privacy-Preserving ML (Pre-2024): Designed a Trusted Execution Environment orchestrator to reduce the Trusted Computing Base for remote-attested production ML launches (e.g., Gboard). Engineered attested browser-to-enclave end-to-end encryption and prevented critical zero-day vulnerabilities during infrastructure design.

N26 | Software Engineer | 2018-01 to 2020-03 | Berlin

Joined a four-engineer web platform rebuild and helped scale the team past 20 engineers as N26 became a unicorn. Led full-stack product work, mentored engineers, and improved production reliability/performance: 30% fewer prod errors, 20% faster time-to-first-meaningful-paint, 1.4s faster time-to-interactive.

Language Academy | Lead Engineer | 2016-08 to 2017-12 | Berlin

Led development of the web platform.

Clue | Web Developer & Design Researcher | 2015-10 to 2016-08 | Berlin

Rebuilt the self-service support website, increasing usage by 20%, and created company-wide user research processes.

Education

• Humboldt University; 2013-10 to 2016-03; Berlin

Recognition

• Google Developer Expert for Web Technologies; 2019-03 to 2020-02