Payman Mohassel
Engineering Leadership, Privacy and GenAI at Meta
payman.mohassel@gmail.comAbout
I lead multiple teams of engineers and domain experts across North America and Europe who build privacy solutions that support GenAI, Monetization, Family of Apps and Reality lab products and use cases. We build and improve Meta's state-of-the-art anonymization technologies and standards for structured and unstructured data serving all its products. We also build a portfolio of privacy enhancing technology (PET) that provide strong and verifiable guarantees of privacy through advanced cryptographic solutions. We take these solutions from ideas all the way to scalable and reusable platforms and infrastructure that power data protection at scale.
In the past I have built and led research and engineering teams working on cryptography, blockchain, privacy and security technologies at Novi/Meta, Visa, and Yahoo. I spent the earlier part of my career in academia as an associate professor at University of Calgary for 6 years and obtained my PhD degree in computer science at UC Davis specializing in cryptography with 60+ peer-reviewed publications.
I have repeatedly bootstrapped multiple teams of engineers and research scientists to deliver high impact and push the industry forward, in a scalable and healthy fashion. I also have technical expertise in design, analysis and deployment of cryptographic protocols, blockchains, authentication mechanisms, and privacy enhancing technology.
Meta 2019 - Present
I have founded and bootstrapped multiple teams of engineers and researchers across North America and Europe who are shaping Meta's future Privacy Infrastructure. We build Meta's anonymization technologies and standards serving all its products and use cases (e.g. Generative AI, Monetization, Family of Apps and Reality Labs) and all data types (structured and unstructured).
We build a portfolio of privacy enhancing technology (PET) that provide strong and verifiable guarantees of privacy. We take these PETs from ideas all the way to scalable and reusable platforms and infrastructure that power data minimization at scale. We build cutting edge solutions that push the industry forward and give back to the community through publicly sharing our designs, open sourcing our code and collaborating with academic and non-profit organizations.
I led & supported a team of high caliber cryptography engineers and researchers who helped design & build the cryptography algorithms, libraries and protocols that powered Meta's blockchain effort.
Visa Research 2016 - 2019
I lead Visa Research's advanced cryptography team, where I help build a world-class program with expertise in advanced cryptography. We work on challenging problems ranging from privacy-preserving machine learning, search on encrypted data, distributed secret management, user authentication, post-quantum cryptography, protocol analysis, and privacy for cryptocurrencies. We engage with engineering, products, business partners, and academics to develop new technologies that will shape the future of secure payments and data protection.
Yahoo 2014 - 2016
At Yahoo Labs I work on projects related to user/device authentication, data protection at rest and in transit, making End-to-End encryption practical, designing new crypto libraries/protocols, and applying privacy-enhancing technologies to practice.
Academic 2004 - 2014
My research spans information security, cryptography, and privacy-enhancing technologies, with a focus on bridging the gap between theory and practice. Key areas include privacy-preserving machine learning, secure multi-party computation, encrypted data search, and post-quantum cryptography.
Investment
Investment philosophy and portfolio details coming soon.