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About

Security engineer who builds real tools, not just findings — with tests, CI gates and strict typing.

Johan David Rodriguez Castro
Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia (remote-ready)

Security & AI Engineer | Detection Engineering · Supply-Chain Security · Applied ML

Final-semester Systems & Software Engineering student (UPB Bucaramanga), early-career — I ship real tools and measure whether they work.

I'm a final-semester Systems & Software Engineering student at UPB (Bucaramanga) who operates at an engineering level rather than a findings level. The thread running through my work is measurement: I build production-grade tools with tests, CI pipelines and strict typing, and then I check whether the number I just produced means anything. SlopGuard, my flagship, addresses slopsquatting — the attack surface where LLMs suggest package names that do not exist and attackers pre-register them with malicious code — with a 5-layer detection engine, zero runtime dependencies and frontends for CLI, pre-commit, GitHub Actions and a self-hostable SaaS. My phishing classifier found two independent label leaks in the dataset the literature reports 99 %+ on, and publishes the honest number instead: 70.5 % recall at a 1 % false-positive rate against phishing collected two years later. My vulnerability-prioritisation dashboard reproduced the 6.1× advantage everyone quotes for EPSS and then showed most of it is an artefact of scoring a forecaster against data it had already seen. Alongside that: mobile hardening with TOTP 2FA and OS-backed secure storage, and high-availability AWS infrastructure fully codified in Terraform. Verified C2 English (EF SET 80/100). Available for remote collaboration.

Skills

Security & AppSec

  • Software supply-chain security (slopsquatting detection)
  • Dependency scanning & pre-install guarding
  • Detection engineering (detection-as-code, MITRE ATT&CK T1566)
  • Risk-based vulnerability prioritisation (CISA KEV · EPSS · CVSS)
  • Phishing analysis & URL/host triage
  • Endpoint threat detection (port scans, intrusions)
  • TOTP 2FA & backup codes
  • Secure SDLC & CI security gates
  • Mobile app hardening (biometric lock with lifecycle re-lock)
  • Argon2id PIN hashing (memory-hard)
  • OS-backed secure storage
  • Encryption at rest (SQLCipher)
  • Row-Level Security (RLS)

Applied ML & AI

  • Gradient boosting (LightGBM, XGBoost) & ensembles
  • Data-leakage detection & honest evaluation design
  • Model explainability (TreeSHAP), reimplemented and parity-tested
  • Grouped, temporal and walk-forward validation; probability calibration
  • Statistical evaluation with bootstrap confidence intervals
  • Transformer NLP for sentiment (FinBERT)
  • Multi-agent orchestration (CrewAI) & LLM API integration
  • RAG over document corpora (ChromaDB, embeddings)
  • Model-as-a-service (FastAPI + Docker)

Languages

  • Python
  • TypeScript / JavaScript
  • SQL
  • Dart
  • HCL (Terraform)
  • LaTeX

Backend & Data

  • FastAPI · REST APIs
  • WebSockets & event-driven architecture (asyncio)
  • pandas / NumPy data pipelines
  • PostgreSQL · SQLAlchemy 2.0
  • DuckDB · SQLite · Streamlit dashboards
  • Hybrid SQL / NoSQL / in-memory data architecture
  • High-availability system design

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • Terraform (IaC), modules & state management
  • AWS — VPC, ALB, Auto Scaling, EC2, RDS Multi-AZ, ECR, CloudWatch
  • Network segmentation & least-privilege security groups
  • Docker & container image hygiene
  • k6 load testing & CloudWatch observability
  • Google Cloud (BigQuery ML, Cloud Storage, DLP)

Tooling & DevSecOps

  • Git / GitHub
  • GitHub Actions / CI-CD
  • pre-commit
  • pytest & Playwright
  • mypy strict · ruff · import-linter
  • CodeQL
  • Package publishing (PyPI, npm)
  • Vercel · GitHub Pages

Frontend

  • React / Next.js (App Router) & Tailwind
  • Flutter UI
  • Responsive web (HTML / CSS / JS), D3.js data visualisation
  • Accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA, axe-checked)

Soft Skills

  • Bilingual EN (C2) / ES (native)
  • Agile / Scrum (Scrum Master)
  • Technical writing: ADRs, specs and stakeholder-ready reports
  • Remote / async collaboration

Experience

  1. Developer / Technical Support

    Pontificia Universidad Bolivariana (UPB) · Jan 2026 – Present · Bucaramanga, Colombia

    • Endpoint threat detection: identification and analysis of port scans and network intrusion attempts.
    • Automated asset classification system (routers, printers, cameras) with real-time monitoring dashboard and KPIs.
    • Technical support to end users across the institution.
  2. Scrum Master

    Pontificia Universidad Bolivariana (UPB) · Jun 2025 – Nov 2025 · Bucaramanga, Colombia

    • Contributed to the design of a high-availability infrastructure targeting ~100k concurrent users with a <500ms latency objective (design target, not a measured outcome).
    • Collaborated on hybrid SQL / NoSQL / in-memory architecture decisions and AI-based analytics integration.
    • Led full Scrum cycle: sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives and stakeholder demos.

Education

  1. B.S. in Systems & Software Engineering

    Pontificia Universidad Bolivariana · Feb 2023 – Present (7th sem.)

    Advanced coursework in software architecture and systems design.

Certifications

Every certificate below links to its issuer for verification.

Security & Cloud

  • Introduction to Cybersecurity

    Cisco Networking Academy · 2026

    Verify
  • Protect Sensitive Data with Data Loss Prevention

    Google Cloud · 2026

    Verify
  • Secure Lakehouse Data

    Google Cloud · 2026

    Verify
  • Use APIs to Work with Cloud Storage

    Google Cloud · 2026

    Verify

AI & Data

  • Google DeepMind: Train A Small Language Model

    Google · 2026

    Verify
  • Orchestrate Multi-agent Workflows with Gemini Enterprise

    Google Cloud · 2026

    Verify
  • Create Your First Gemini Enterprise Application

    Google Cloud · 2026

    Verify
  • Build a Smart Cloud Application with Vibe Coding and MCP

    Google Cloud · 2026

    Verify
  • Create ML Models with BigQuery ML

    Google Cloud · 2026

    Verify
  • Hugging Face Agents Course

    Hugging Face · 2026

    Verify
  • Machine Learning with Python

    freeCodeCamp · 2026

    Verify
  • Data Analysis with Python

    freeCodeCamp · 2026

    Verify

Engineering Fundamentals

  • Scientific Computing with Python

    freeCodeCamp · 2026

    Verify
  • Data Visualization

    freeCodeCamp · 2026

    Verify
  • JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures

    freeCodeCamp · 2026

    Verify

Languages

  • EF SET English Certificate — CEFR C2 (Proficient), 80/100

    EF SET · 2026

    Verify