# John Cyrus Suriaga John Cyrus Suriaga is a remote worker on Himalayas, Senior Backend Engineer at GitLab, based in Philippines. Source: https://himalayas.app/@johncyrussuriaga ```text Senior software engineer, 10+ years in backend, cloud infrastructure, and applied AI. Most recently at GitLab on AI Platform and DevSecOps. ``` | Detail | Value | | --- | --- | | Availability | Looking for a job | | Location | Philippines | | Authorized to work in | Philippines | | Salary expectations | 60k-200k USD | | Job categories | Back End Developer, Applied AI Engineer, DevSecOps Engineer, Software Engineer, Platform Engineer, AI Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer | | Skills | AWS, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes, Python, Large Language Models, Cloud Infrastructure, DevSecOps, Lang Chain, Backend Development, System Design, RAG | | LinkedIn | https://https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncyrus-suriaga/ | ## What I'm looking for ```text 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 ``` ## About ```text 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 ### Senior Backend Engineer (current) [GitLab](https://himalayas.app/companies/gitlab). Apr 2024 - Present ```text 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. ``` Skills: Python, OpenSearch, Kubernetes, LangChain-Libraries, Pgvector ### Senior Backend Engineer [Canva Philippines](https://himalayas.app/companies/lifeatcanva). Oct 2021 - Mar 2024 ```text 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. ``` Skills: Java, Spring-Boot, Kafka, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL ### Backend Engineer [Rapid7](https://himalayas.app/companies/rapid7). Jun 2020 - Sep 2021 ```text 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%. ``` Skills: Kafka, Kubernetes, Python, AWS, Elasticsearch ### Senior Software Engineer [The Hanover Insurance Group](https://himalayas.app/companies/the-hanover-insurance-group). Jan 2017 - May 2020 ```text 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. ``` Skills: Java, Spring-Boot, SQL-Server, Jenkins, REST-APIs ### Software Engineer [eClinicalWorks](https://himalayas.app/companies/eclinicalworks-india-pvt-ltd). Sep 2015 - Dec 2016 ```text 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. ``` Skills: Java, SQL-Server, MySQL, Python, HL7 ## Education ### Becker College Bachelor of Science, Applied Computer Science. 2011 - 2015 ## Tech stack - AWS IAM - Amazon EC2 - Microsoft Azure - Google Cloud Platform - Amazon S3 - GitHub - GitLab - Kubernetes - Jenkins - GitHub Actions - GitLab CI - MySQL - PostgreSQL - Microsoft SQL Server - Spring Boot - Redis - Terraform - Apache Maven - Apache Kafka on Heroku - Python - Java - Kafka - Amazon SQS - PagerDuty - Grafana - Prometheus - Amazon DynamoDB - Linux - Datadog - Elasticsearch - OpenSearch - AWS Lambda - Amazon RDS - TypeScript - JUnit - OAuth2 - Git - Docker - Amazon Web Services (AWS) - SQL - Google Cloud Run - LangChain - LlamaIndex - LiteLLM - OpenAI API - Anthropic Claude API - Bash - pgvector - Google Cloud Vertex AI Workbench - Middleware To contact John Cyrus, message them from this profile with a Himalayas employer account: [Hire on Himalayas](https://himalayas.app/hire). ## People also viewed - [John Angelo Santos](https://himalayas.app/@johnangelouser): Senior Full Stack/AI Engineer, Oscilar - [Gian Carlo Garcia](https://himalayas.app/@giancarlogarcia): Full Stack Developer, SwissPine Tech - [Angelo Lacson](https://himalayas.app/@angelolacson): Senior Backend Engineer, Tecton - [John Suriaga](https://himalayas.app/@johnsuriaga): Senior Backend Engineer, GitLab - [cliffordklent sayson](https://himalayas.app/@cliffordklentsayson): Senior Full Stack & AI Engineer, Andela - [John Portus](https://himalayas.app/@johnportus): Senior Full Stack & AI Automation Developer, Hoopit.ai - [John Cyrus Suriaga](https://himalayas.app/@johncyrussuriaga1): Senior Backend Engineer, GitLab - [christian lubosana](https://himalayas.app/@christianlubosana): Fullstack Software Engineer, ING - [Aries Lacson](https://himalayas.app/@arieslacson): Senior AI / LLM Backend Engineer, Diffbot - [John Dones](https://himalayas.app/@johndones): Senior AI Software Engineer, Fullscript