John Siracusa

Senior Software Engineer | Data Platforms, Distributed Systems & AI Tooling

Engineering leadership Data platforms Distributed systems AI developer tooling
LocationColumbus, Ohio
Emailhello@johnsiracusa.dev GitHubgithub.com/siracusa5 LinkedInlinkedin.com/in/siracusa5

Senior software engineer and hands-on manager with eight years building and operating distributed data systems processing about 140 million events per day. Led migrations that cut reporting latency from 2+ hours to under five minutes; now builds agent infrastructure, developer tooling, and company-wide observability.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Associate Manager

Mar 2026 - Present

  • Co-build the data group's knowledge graph of incidents, schemas, and data usage patterns so agents can answer data questions and write efficient queries; designed to federate company-wide.
  • Set schema and architecture direction for a creator data platform serving five core and up to ten partner teams, aligning engineering, analytics, data science, product, operations, and leadership.
  • Manage several engineers across hiring, delivery planning, coaching, and reviews while remaining hands-on in platform architecture and production on-call.
  • Lead Grafana dashboards and incident-response tooling that became the company-wide shared observability framework.
  • Evaluate AI development tools, build reusable agent skills, and train 10+ engineers on shared workflows while advising leadership on adoption.

Data Engineer II

Feb 2022 - Mar 2026

  • Led the migration from legacy batch processing to the streaming platform, cutting average reporting latency from 2+ hours to under 5 minutes.
  • Operated 80+ production data pipelines behind client reporting, internal analytics, and data science through roughly 8x growth, to about 140 million events per day.
  • Designed and implemented a data lake for point-in-time reporting and built production auditing against SLOs.

Data Engineer I

Feb 2020 - Feb 2022

  • Migrated Identity, Attribution, and Data Platform services from Hadoop and Cloudera to Google Cloud, decommissioning legacy systems; established Data Platform's LogicMonitor observability standards.

Junior Software Engineer

May 2018 - Feb 2020

  • Built Scala metrics workflows, streaming alerts, and operational dashboards that surfaced failures earlier; joined production on-call early and handled live incidents.

Education

The Ohio State University

B.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering
Columbus, Ohio
2018

Earlier experience

Lexmark International

Embedded Systems Engineer Intern

Jan 2017 - May 2017

Designed and built a DC power meter to evaluate printer power-supply efficiency, with a custom PCB that met form-factor constraints across several printer lines.

Selected work

Products, tools, and client sites

Work built outside of my day job, organized through Augustino LLC. The portfolio has deeper product detail and live links.

ContextCake

Context infrastructure for AI agents

An open-source context system that layers company, team, and personal knowledge and resolves it efficiently at read time, keeping each answer's source, date, and conflicts. It indexes Markdown folders, GitHub repositories, and other sources with BM25F; agents query it over MCP. Local Grafana dashboards and OpenTelemetry traces make retrieval observable without blocking it.

HarnessKit

Portable setup for AI coding tools

Keeps plugins, skills, MCP servers, hooks, and conventions in one config that works across Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, and other coding harnesses.

Mind Your Blanks

Games for any group

Live party games on a Go backend, operated with metrics, synthetic probes, nightly backups, and automated rollback; Grafana Cloud alerts can wake a Claude incident agent that rolls back unhealthy releases.

CommentReel

Comments, carried forward

A lightweight web component for publishing selected audience comments as an accessible, configurable reel that keeps each comment’s source link.

2 Girls 1 Parlay

Sports picks with a public record

A sports prediction site with automated grading, public results, a daily picks hub with cross-game parlays, a player-prop research desk, a live leg-by-leg board, and payments and fulfillment through Stripe and Printful.

Hometown Media

Website for a Tennessee sports media team

Site design and front-end work built around photography, clear services, and an easier way for teams, athletes, and coaches to get in touch.

Skills

Technical foundation

Core · Languages
Scala, Java, SQL, Bash/Shell
Core · Data platforms
Kafka, Spark, Airflow, SingleStore, MySQL, Bigtable, Cloud Storage, GCP and Dataproc; streaming and batch pipelines, ETL/ELT, change data capture, data lakes and warehousing, analytics engineering, data quality and auditing
Core · Backend and architecture
Production JVM services, distributed and event-driven systems, system architecture, schema design and data modeling
Core · Agent infrastructure
Context retrieval, knowledge graphs, MCP, Claude Code, Codex, agent plugins, skills and hooks, developer enablement
Core · Reliability
Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Cloud Monitoring, LogicMonitor, GitHub Actions and CI/CD; alerting, SLOs, on-call, incident response, release verification
Core · Technical leadership
Technical direction, engineering standards and shared frameworks, end-to-end product engineering, mentoring, code review, cross-functional and incident leadership
Additional · Languages and backend
Python, TypeScript and Go; API design, Go services, REST/JSON APIs, background jobs, WebSockets, rate limiting, CLI and desktop delivery
Additional · Applied AI and retrieval
LLM applications and evaluations, RAG, BM25F, embeddings, Anthropic and OpenAI APIs, tool calling, model routing and multi-agent workflows
Additional · Cloud and product delivery
Docker, Cloudflare Pages and Workers, Railway, Linux, React, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Playwright, automated testing, accessibility testing, release automation and synthetic monitoring