Russell Ballestrini
===================

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**Product & Services Engineer | 860-333-3047 | russell@unturf.com**

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`LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/russellballestrini>`_ | `Self-hosted GitLab <https://git.unturf.com/explore>`_ | `Personal Website <https://russell.ballestrini.net>`_ | `Portfolio <https://www.unturf.com/software>`_

Professional Summary
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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.

Core Competencies
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Full Stack Software Development, Physical & Cloud Infrastructure, DevOps & CI/CD, System Arch, FOSS Development, Team Leadership, Scaling, Security, and Cost Optimizations

Professional Experience
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**Founder & Author**
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
**Make Post Sell, uncloseai.com & unsandbox.com** - Remote | 01/2019 - 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" using machine learning to cover 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.

Tech: GNU/Linux, Python, Pyramid, SQLAlchemy, Caddy, Docker, Gitlab Runners


**Full Stack Engineer**
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
**Coursemojo** - Remote | 10/2022 - 10/2025

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.

Tech: AWS (CloudFormation, ECR, ECS, ALB), GitHub Actions, Docker, Nginx, uWSGI, Python, Datadog


**Senior Security Engineer**
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
**Cofense** - Remote | 07/2020 - 03/2022

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. Gitlab, Okta, DefectDojo, CloudMapper, ECR vulnerability scans.


**Lead Site Reliability Engineer**
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
**Remind** - Remote | 06/2017 - 07/2020

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.

Tech: AWS (ECS, EC2, SQS, RDS, DynamoDB), GNU/Linux, Python, Ruby, CloudFormation, Datadog, RabbitMQ

Earlier Career Highlights
-------------------------

- **Senior System Engineer** at Mobiquity - Remote (06/2016 - 06/2017)
- **DevOps Engineer** at Mandiant - Remote (07/2014 - 05/2016)
- **Founder** at Remarkbox - Remote | 02/2016 - Present
- **System Engineer** at Cars.com - Remote (10/2012 - 06/2014)
- **Founder** of LinkPeek - Remote (01/2012 - 01/2022)
- **Unix System Administrator** at CSC - On site across 3 data centers - DoD Contractor

Education
---------

**Associate of Science in Computer Science**

Three Rivers Community College

**Bachelor of Science in Computer Science**

Eastern Connecticut State University - 93 credits towards degree


Technical Skills
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- **Operating Systems**: GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat, Alpine
- **Programming**: Python, Bash, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Go, JavaScript, Java
- **Cloud**: AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean, unsandbox
- **DevOps**: Gitlab, SaltStack, Ansible, Packer, Docker, Kubernetes, Firecracker, LXD/LXC, KVM, libvirt, gitlab-ci runners
- **Databases**: Sqlite3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB
- **Queues**: SQS, RabbitMQ, ZMQ
- **Web**: Flask, Pyramid, uWSGI, Nginx, Apache, Caddy, SSE, Websockets, OpenAPI
- **Machine Learning & AI Agents**: Built opencompletion.com, a multi-user chatroom integrating with all major LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Groq, MistralAI, Together.ai, AWS Bedrock) & self-hosted inference servers (vLLM, llama.cpp, Ollama, Unsloth). Built uncloseai.com, a free OpenAI-compatible inference gateway with reference implementations across 42 programming languages demonstrating streaming completions, tool use, & structured outputs. Built unsandbox.com as code execution infrastructure for AI agents, enabling autonomous code generation, testing, & verification in sandboxed containers. Experience with prompt engineering & agentic workflows orchestrating multi-step reasoning & tool calling.
