# Hongkai Pan

> Software Engineer at Persona

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/hongkai

I've researched and developed models and solutions that's been very successful at detecting and preventing abuse such as spam and account takeover. I've detected and deactivated tens of millions of fake accounts during my time at Pinterest -- all ideas were more or less my owns.

It often costs companies over a million a year in 3rd party contracts with vendors to detect and prevent abuse -- and they oftentimes don't even work very well since the models behind them aren't the best. Hire me and I can make your spam and account takeover problems go away at a cheaper cost with much better quality😜

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Persona
Jan 2025 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States
Aug 2025: Technically the eng. manager for the Labs team here. However, there's no real management work since the team is nearly 100% IC-driven

Inventing new models for detecting fraud.

The best adversarial fraud models are neither rule based nor are they based off any supervised ML techniques. No existing unsupervised ML or anomaly detection models comes close to what's possible either. Rather -- need to invent it altogether from scratch

### Software Engineer @ Whatnot
Jan 2023 – Jan 2025
- Detecting and preventing Referral Abuse, troll bidding, giveaway abuse, fraudulent buyers/sellers

### Software Engineer, Anti-abuse @ Pinterest
Jan 2019 – Jan 2022
Working to stop Account Takeover and Spam!

### Software Engineer @ Dropbox
Jan 2015 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco, CA
Abuse Prevention:
- Solved Account Takeover! Developed and production-ized model to stop ATOs. There has been no successful account takeover attacks since model was deployed.

### Software Engineer Intern @ Facebook
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Menlo Park, CA
Interned on the Internet.org team


## Education
### Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Math, Computer Engineering
University of Wisconsin-Madison


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/hongkai-pan-37228b160

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Source: https://flows.cv/hongkai
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/hongkai/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-11