resume.json

{
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  "basics": {
    "name": "Russell Ballestrini",
    "label": "Product & Services Engineer",
    "email": "russell@unturf.com",
    "url": "https://russell.ballestrini.net",
    "summary": "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.",
    "location": {
      "region": "Connecticut",
      "countryCode": "US"
    },
    "profiles": [
      {
        "network": "LinkedIn",
        "username": "russellballestrini",
        "url": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/russellballestrini"
      },
      {
        "network": "GitLab",
        "username": "russellballestrini",
        "url": "https://git.unturf.com/explore"
      },
      {
        "network": "Website",
        "username": "unturf",
        "url": "https://www.unturf.com/software"
      }
    ]
  },
  "work": [
    {
      "name": "Make Post Sell, uncloseai.com & unsandbox.com",
      "position": "Founder & Author",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2019-01",
      "summary": "Bootstrapped a multi-tenant e-commerce platform for digital & physical product sales.",
      "highlights": [
        "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"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Coursemojo",
      "position": "Full Stack Engineer",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2022-10",
      "endDate": "2025-10",
      "summary": "Led the development & scaling of an AI assistant teacher for public schools, focusing on infrastructure management & application scaling.",
      "highlights": [
        "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"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Cofense",
      "position": "Senior Security Engineer",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2020-07",
      "endDate": "2022-03",
      "summary": "Spearheaded security automation and compliance initiatives for SOC2 and FedRAMP environments.",
      "highlights": [
        "Managed AWS account controls & user access management for cloud",
        "Ensured security integrity in product delivery",
        "Implemented Gitlab, Okta, DefectDojo, CloudMapper, ECR vulnerability scans"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Remind",
      "position": "Lead Site Reliability Engineer",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2017-06",
      "endDate": "2020-07",
      "summary": "Managed AWS infrastructure and led cloud cost optimization, security enhancements, and developer productivity improvements.",
      "highlights": [
        "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"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "Mobiquity",
      "position": "Senior System Engineer",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2016-06",
      "endDate": "2017-06"
    },
    {
      "name": "Mandiant",
      "position": "DevOps Engineer",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2014-07",
      "endDate": "2016-05"
    },
    {
      "name": "Remarkbox",
      "position": "Founder",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2016-02"
    },
    {
      "name": "Cars.com",
      "position": "System Engineer",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2012-10",
      "endDate": "2014-06"
    },
    {
      "name": "LinkPeek",
      "position": "Founder",
      "location": "Remote",
      "startDate": "2012-01",
      "endDate": "2022-01"
    },
    {
      "name": "CSC",
      "position": "Unix System Administrator",
      "description": "DoD Contractor",
      "location": "On site across 3 data centers"
    }
  ],
  "education": [
    {
      "institution": "Three Rivers Community College",
      "area": "Computer Science",
      "studyType": "Associate of Science"
    },
    {
      "institution": "Eastern Connecticut State University",
      "area": "Computer Science",
      "studyType": "Bachelor of Science",
      "score": "93 credits towards degree"
    }
  ],
  "skills": [
    {
      "name": "Full Stack Development",
      "level": "Expert",
      "keywords": ["Python", "Bash", "PHP", "Perl", "Ruby", "Go", "JavaScript"]
    },
    {
      "name": "Cloud Infrastructure",
      "level": "Expert",
      "keywords": ["AWS", "GCP", "Digital Ocean", "CloudFormation", "ECS", "EC2", "SQS", "RDS", "DynamoDB"]
    },
    {
      "name": "DevOps & CI/CD",
      "level": "Expert",
      "keywords": ["Gitlab", "SaltStack", "Ansible", "Packer", "Docker", "Kubernetes", "Firecracker", "LXD/LXC", "KVM", "libvirt", "gitlab-ci runners"]
    },
    {
      "name": "Operating Systems",
      "level": "Expert",
      "keywords": ["GNU/Linux", "Ubuntu", "Debian", "Redhat", "Alpine"]
    },
    {
      "name": "Databases",
      "level": "Advanced",
      "keywords": ["Sqlite3", "MySQL", "PostgreSQL", "DynamoDB", "MongoDB"]
    },
    {
      "name": "Web Technologies",
      "level": "Expert",
      "keywords": ["Flask", "Pyramid", "uWSGI", "Nginx", "Apache", "Caddy", "SSE", "Websockets", "OpenAPI"]
    },
    {
      "name": "Core Competencies",
      "keywords": ["System Architecture", "FOSS Development", "Team Leadership", "Scaling", "Security", "Cost Optimizations"]
    }
  ],
  "meta": {
    "canonical": "https://russell.ballestrini.net/uploads/russell.ballestrini.resume.json",
    "version": "v1.0.0",
    "lastModified": "2025-12-06"
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}