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Russell Ballestrini

Russell Ballestrini

Product & Services Engineer

Connecticut, US

Background


About

About

Innovative and results-driven Full Stack Engineer with over 15 years of experience in scaling systems, automating processes, and developing open-source software. Proven track record in executing ideas guided by vision and mission, uniting teams through effective communication, and growing product pipelines. Expertise in AWS infrastructure, DevOps practices, and growing SaaS products from the ground up.

Work Experience

Work Experience

  • Founder & Author, Make Post Sell, uncloseai.com & unsandbox.com

    Jan, 2019 - Present

    Bootstrapped a multi-tenant e-commerce platform for digital & physical product sales.

    • Developed & open-sourced a complete SaaS solution with a commission-free selling model for shop owners

    • Hot wallet payments for Monero, Dogecoin, Litecoin, & Bitcoin crypto currencies with auto quotes based on cart totals

    • Authored 'uncloseai. Machine Learning Reference Guide to Inference Clients' covering inference client implementations & streaming techniques across 42 programming languages

    • Built unsandbox.com, an anonymous remote code compilation & execution API supporting 42+ languages with containerized isolation, artifact generation, & async execution for humans & ML agents

  • Full Stack Engineer, Coursemojo

    Oct, 2022 - Oct, 20253 years

    Led the development & scaling of an AI assistant teacher for public schools, focusing on infrastructure management & application scaling.

    • Designed and implemented CI/CD pipelines for two monolithic services using AWS CloudFormation and GitHub Actions

    • Introduced Datadog with Fargate sidecar agents for APM, logging, & custom metrics

    • Scaled AI-powered educational tools using commodity language models (OpenAI & Anthropic)

    • Implemented student monitoring tools to enhance the teacher's birds eye view of the classroom

    • Websocket enhancements like class pause, fastforward, & single-student restarts

  • Senior Security Engineer, Cofense

    Jul, 2020 - Mar, 20221 year 8 months

    Spearheaded security automation and compliance initiatives for SOC2 and FedRAMP environments.

    • Managed AWS account controls & user access management for cloud

    • Ensured security integrity in product delivery

    • Implemented Gitlab, Okta, DefectDojo, CloudMapper, ECR vulnerability scans

  • Lead Site Reliability Engineer, Remind

    Jun, 2017 - Jul, 20203 years 1 month

    Managed AWS infrastructure and led cloud cost optimization, security enhancements, and developer productivity improvements.

    • Ensured critical services scaled during COVID-19 lockdowns, supporting distance learning initiatives

    • Introduced Datadog with EC2 agents for container APM, logs, & custom metrics

    • Infrastructure-as-code using Python & Stacker

    • Contributed to SlashDeploy tool for GitHub deployments via Slack commands, pioneering deployment automation before modern CI/CD platforms

    • Authored technical blog posts

  • Senior System Engineer, Mobiquity

    Jun, 2016 - Jun, 20171 year

  • DevOps Engineer, Mandiant

    Jul, 2014 - May, 20161 year 10 months

  • Founder, Remarkbox

    Feb, 2016 - Present

  • System Engineer, Cars.com

    Oct, 2012 - Jun, 20141 year 8 months

  • Founder, LinkPeek

    Jan, 2012 - Jan, 202210 years

  • Unix System Administrator, CSC

    - Present

Skills

Skills

  • Full Stack Development

    Python

    Bash

    PHP

    Perl

    Ruby

    Go

    JavaScript

  • Cloud Infrastructure

    AWS

    GCP

    Digital Ocean

    CloudFormation

    ECS

    EC2

    SQS

    RDS

    DynamoDB

  • DevOps & CI/CD

    Gitlab

    SaltStack

    Ansible

    Packer

    Docker

    Kubernetes

    Firecracker

    LXD/LXC

    KVM

    libvirt

    gitlab-ci runners

  • Operating Systems

    GNU/Linux

    Ubuntu

    Debian

    Redhat

    Alpine

  • Databases

    Sqlite3

    MySQL

    PostgreSQL

    DynamoDB

    MongoDB

  • Web Technologies

    Flask

    Pyramid

    uWSGI

    Nginx

    Apache

    Caddy

    SSE

    Websockets

    OpenAPI

  • Core Competencies

    System Architecture

    FOSS Development

    Team Leadership

    Scaling

    Security

    Cost Optimizations

Education

Education

  • Computer Science, Associate of Science, Three Rivers Community College

    - Present

  • Computer Science, Bachelor of Science, Eastern Connecticut State University

    - Present