Curriculum Vitae
Ami Heines
Senior Backend Engineer — security and blockchain
Summary
Backend engineer with thirty years building production systems. For seven years I was backend architect of CISOteria, a multi-tenant security and compliance SaaS that also powers the Israel National Cyber Directorate’s GRC portal. Alongside it I have built on blockchains since 2021: smart contracts in C++ / WebAssembly, a biometric wallet that signs with WebAuthn, and self-hosted BFT networks behind a wire-fraud-prevention product for real estate.
My recent work is about stopping a bad action in the request path rather than reporting it afterwards: a fail-closed gateway that cuts off runaway AI agents and abusive traffic before the spend happens. B.Sc. Mathematics & Physics, Tel-Aviv University. Former startup founder (7 patents), IDF Major (ret.). Looking for a hands-on backend role — available now.
Selected projects
CISOteria — Security & Compliance SaaS · Backend Architect & Team Lead
2019–2026- — Backend architect for a multi-tenant CISO / compliance platform, owning API design, data model and overall architecture. The same platform powers the Israel National Cyber Directorate’s GRC portal (grc.cyber.gov.il), built during my last year there, and was being onboarded to Project Nimbus, the Israeli government cloud, when I left.
- — Node.js / Express microservices alongside a large legacy PHP codebase I modernised incrementally; MariaDB, Redis, Docker, Terraform, AWS, SSO / SAML, CloudTrail.
- — Brought NVD / CVE vulnerability data into the platform’s management dashboard; per-tenant isolation enforced through the API permission model.
- — Led a small distributed team across Israel and India and established the automated-test practice.
ChainVault — Wire-fraud prevention for real estate
2023–present- — Records and cryptographically commits each step of a real-estate wire transfer on a private chain, so that any later alteration of the payment instructions is detectable.
- — Self-hosted network of four Antelope block producers with a history node, a PostgreSQL read cache, encrypted document storage and an nginx front with rate limiting — deployed with Docker, with no third-party chain dependency. The same design runs Verarta, a provenance ledger for galleries and collectors.
EOSIO wallet and smart contracts
2021–2022- — EOS in a Box: biometric-secured smartphone wallet for EOSIO, signing transactions with WebAuthn.
- — EOStarter: NFT pack-opening smart contract in C++ / WebAssembly.
- — EOSIO Stack Exchange — ranked #11 globally.
Enforcement and machine-learning systems
2024–2026- — Guardrail: fail-closed gateway enforcing hard spend caps and denial-of-wallet limits on LLM apps and agents: runaway agent loops and abusive traffic are stopped in the request path. Live at guardrail.smallestbusiness.com; published as a LiteLLM plugin. github.com/amih/guardrail
- — Intent classifier: LoRA fine-tune of xlm-roberta-large reaching 94.2% on BANKING77 at 12 ms per request, against 85.3% and about 2 s for a general LLM. github.com/amih/intent-router
- — Banking copilot on LangGraph with authorisation enforced in code, human approval before any money-moving action, and an eval suite run before every commit. github.com/amih/banking-copilot
- — Retrieval service on Postgres / pgvector scaled to a 35M-chunk index with HNSW and about 1 ms queries. github.com/amih/rag-pgvector-demo
Earlier: encrypted-SMS lottery automation with endpoint ticket sales, Philippines (2017–2018); automated online lending platform, USA — Lendmart (2016–2017).
Experience
Technical skills
- Languages
- Python, JavaScript / Node.js, C++, PHP, SQL
- Backend
- REST APIs, Node.js / Express, microservices, multi-tenant SaaS, legacy modernisation
- Blockchain
- Antelope / EOSIO smart contracts (C++ / WebAssembly), BFT consensus, private chain deployment, WebAuthn signing
- Security
- Vulnerability data (NVD / CVE), SSO / SAML, audit-trail design, OWASP LLM Top 10, ISO 27001 / SOC 2 / NIST control frameworks
- Data
- PostgreSQL (+ pgvector), MariaDB / MySQL, Redis, Elasticsearch
- Infra
- AWS, Docker, Terraform, nginx, Linux, CI/CD, Prometheus / Grafana / Loki
- Machine learning
- LoRA fine-tuning, retrieval, evaluation, LangGraph
Education
Recognition & patents
- — 7 international patents in MEMS display technology (1998–2004)
- — SPIE Conference: Bi-Stable flat-panel display (Proceedings of SPIE Vol. 4712, 2002)
- — Commanding Officer, Major (ret.), Israel Defense Forces
- — Hebrew (native), English (fluent)