Looking for a job

John Cyrus Suriaga

@johncyrussuriaga

Senior software engineer, 10+ years in backend, cloud infrastructure, and applied AI. Most recently at GitLab on AI Platform and DevSecOps.

Philippines

Message

What I'm looking for

Senior or staff roles in applied AI, backend platforms, DevSecOps, or healthcare AI. Fully remote, async-friendly preferred, comfortable with US and EU time-zone overlap

Most of my career has been on the parts of a system nobody notices until they break. Audit logs, access controls, data pipelines, compliance infrastructure. That shaped how I think about AI engineering. Getting a model to produce a good response is the easy part. Building the system around it that handles authorization correctly, controls costs, catches adversarial inputs, and produces an audit trail a regulated enterprise can rely on is the harder problem.

For the past two years at GitLab I've been working on exactly that. I maintained and extended the AI Gateway routing requests across Anthropic Claude, Vertex AI, and OpenAI, built permission-aware RAG pipelines for Duo Chat keeping retrieval latency under 200ms at p95 with project-level access control on every chunk, and hardened AI features against prompt injection and PII leakage for enterprise customers with strict data-residency requirements.

Before that, platform infrastructure at Canva serving 150M+ monthly active users, cloud security pipelines at Rapid7 processing tens of millions of asset records a day, and compliance-critical backend work at Hanover Insurance and eClinicalWorks. Compliance has been part of every role: HIPAA at eClinicalWorks, SOX-adjacent audit work at Hanover, GDPR at GitLab.

U.S.-educated, spent the first half of my career working directly in Massachusetts. Fully remote from Angeles, Pampanga, Philippines since 2020, working across US and EU time zones.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Backend Engineer

Current

GitLab

Apr 2024 - Present (2 years 2 months)

AI Gateway (Anthropic, Vertex, OpenAI): JWT tenant isolation, entitlements, rate limiting that cut unauthorized access ~30%. Permission-aware RAG with pgvector + OpenSearch at sub-200ms p95, project-level ACLs on every chunk. Built Code Suggestions eval harness, SAST normalization, and the prompt-injection / PII / audit log layer.

Python OpenSearch Kubernetes LangChain Libraries Pgvector

Senior Backend Engineer

Canva Philippines

Oct 2021 - Mar 2024 (2 years 5 months)

Java/Spring Boot microservices for the template metadata platform: 150M+ MAU at ~400 designs/sec on GCP/K8s. Localization metadata across 30+ locales (~40% cut in editorial review). Shared Visual Suite backend for Docs, Whiteboards, Presentations. AI provider wrappers with token budgets and cost monitoring.

Java Spring Boot Kafka Kubernetes PostgreSQL

Backend Engineer

Rapid7

Jun 2020 - Sep 2021 (1 year 3 months)

Cloud asset harvesting pipelines for InsightCloudSec across customers' AWS/Azure/GCP. 80+ resource types, tens of millions of records/day on Kafka, Elasticsearch, MySQL/RDS. Led the DivvyCloud taxonomy mapping post-acquisition. Prometheus / Grafana / PagerDuty alerting took harvest reliability from ~94% to ~99.2%.

Kafka Kubernetes Python AWS Elasticsearch

Senior Software Engineer

The Hanover Insurance Group

Jan 2017 - May 2020 (3 years 4 months)

REST claims intake/status APIs over legacy policy admin systems. SQL Server audit-log service for policy mutations (SOX-adjacent). Migrated five Java services to Jenkins CI/CD with staged gates, biweekly to weekly releases. Led a COBOL-to-Java policy migration with comparison scripts validating output parity before cutover.

Java Spring Boot SQL Server Jenkins REST APIs

Software Engineer

eClinicalWorks

Sep 2015 - Dec 2016 (1 year 3 months)

First production job. EHR workflow defects across e-prescribing, scheduling, billing, documentation for 130,000+ providers. Regression tests and SQL data-integrity queries for support and implementation teams. Audit-log verification patterns and release verification for HIPAA-regulated software.

Java SQL Server MySQL Python HL7