Octane - Staff Platform Engineer
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:date: 2026-01-17
:status: draft

To the Octane team:

$1.6B in loan originations means your platform handles real money at scale. When infrastructure fails, dealers can't close sales & customers walk. Building platform services that are reliable, scalable, & secure under that pressure is exactly what I've done throughout my career.

**AWS at depth**: EC2, ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, Lambda, CloudFormation. At Remind, built infrastructure supporting 30M users & 60+ microservices. Led cloud cost optimization initiatives while maintaining reliability. At Coursemojo, ran Fargate-based services with auto-scaling for AI workloads. Currently building unsandbox.com on AWS with multi-tenant isolation & resource quotas.

**Platform engineering**: At Remind, I was the infrastructure layer that product teams built on. Observability, deployment pipelines, service reliability. At Cofense, worked in security-focused environments (SOC2/FedRAMP) where platform services needed to be auditable & reproducible. Fintech compliance requirements are familiar territory.

**Technical leadership**: Staff-level means mentoring & architecture decisions, not just execution. I've bootstrapped companies (LinkPeek, Remarkbox, unsandbox.com) where I owned everything. At larger companies (Remind, Cofense, Coursemojo), I've led initiatives & helped other engineers level up.

**Reliability at scale**: At Remind, managed infrastructure during COVID-19 lockdowns when education communication became critical & usage spiked dramatically. Systems stayed up. At Coursemojo, built the reliability layer for AI services handling concurrent workloads.

**Security mindset**: At Cofense (email security company), worked in SOC2/FedRAMP environments. Understanding that fintech means PCI, SOC2, & treating security as a first-class concern, not an afterthought.

Building platform infrastructure for a profitable unicorn in the lending space is exactly the kind of challenge I'm looking for.

Russell Ballestrini

https://russell.ballestrini.net | https://github.com/russellballestrini
