
**Russell Ballestrini**

russell@unturf.com | 860-333-3047 | https://russell.ballestrini.net

December 13, 2025

**EnergyHub**

**Re: Senior Software Engineer**

To the EnergyHub Hiring Team:

Top 3 reasons my experience aligns with building demand response technology for the energy sector:

**1. Distributed systems & messaging infrastructure at scale**: At Remind (2017-2020), led infrastructure for 60+ microservices supporting 30M users during COVID-19 lockdowns when distance learning demand exploded. Performed RabbitMQ upgrades, migrations, & maintenance for messaging infrastructure handling millions of messages. Managed AWS infrastructure including ECS, EC2, SQS, RDS, & DynamoDB. Built infrastructure-as-code using Python & Stacker. This hands-on experience with distributed systems, message queues, & cloud infrastructure directly translates to EnergyHub's demand response platform controlling millions of grid-edge devices.

**2. Full stack development with Java ecosystem familiarity**: While Python is my primary language (15+ years), I have experience with the JVM ecosystem through Elasticsearch operations & Minecraft server development. I'm comfortable reading Java, understanding JVM concepts, & leveraging LLMs to accelerate development in Java when needed. At Coursemojo (2022-2025), designed CI/CD pipelines using AWS CloudFormation & GitHub Actions, scaled AI-powered services, & implemented websocket enhancements for real-time features. My polyglot experience (Python, Ruby, Go, JavaScript, Java) means I adapt quickly to new codebases & can contribute across the stack.

**3. Mission-driven work & end-to-end ownership**: My career has focused on impactful products: educational technology at Remind & Coursemojo serving millions of students, open-source tools that empower developers, & my own SaaS products built from the ground up. EnergyHub's mission to build a clean energy future resonates strongly. I've built production systems that require 24/7 reliability, handled security & compliance at Cofense (SOC2/FedRAMP), & understand what it takes to own projects end-to-end from architecture through production support.

The opportunity to work on technology that controls millions of devices for demand response & energy efficiency combines technical challenge with meaningful climate impact. I'm excited to bring my distributed systems experience, messaging infrastructure expertise, & full-stack capabilities to help EnergyHub build the clean energy future.

Sincerely,

Russell Ballestrini
