Schoolhouse World - Senior Software Engineer
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:date: 2025-11-13

To Schoolhouse World:

I'm excited about Schoolhouse's mission to provide a global safety net for students in the AI era. At https://coursemojo.com (2022-2025), I built an AI teacher assistant serving 60,000+ students in public middle schools, keeping ML algorithms on rails & within safety thresholds for vulnerable populations. This experience taught me that ed-tech AI must balance innovation with student protection, exactly what Schoolhouse needs as you scale peer tutoring globally. At https://remind.com (2017-2020), I scaled infrastructure for 30 million users during COVID-19 lockdowns when students desperately needed connection & support. I understand the responsibility of building systems students depend on for learning. My full-stack experience spans Node.js backends, Postgres databases, AWS/GCP infrastructure, & real-time websockets for classroom monitoring. While I'm stronger in Python, I've worked across stacks throughout my career & can quickly adapt to TypeScript/React/Next.js to contribute to your 5-person team.

The opportunity to work with Sal Khan on making peer tutoring accessible worldwide resonates deeply. I've built complete SaaS platforms (https://makepostsell.com, https://remarkbox.com) from database design to production deployment, so I understand owning technical decisions from ideation to launch. I run https://uncloseai.com, a community project offering ML inference at scale, including sandboxed code execution across 38 languages. This experience with educational technology, AI safety guardrails, scaling for student populations, & building reliable systems positions me well to help Schoolhouse create meaningful connections between learners & tutors while maintaining the platform's stability & trust.

Russell Ballestrini
russell@ballestrini.net
860-333-3047
https://russell.ballestrini.net
