
Russell Ballestrini
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**Senior Data Privacy Software Developer | OpenDP / Harvard University**

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russell@unturf.com | `russell.ballestrini.net <https://russell.ballestrini.net>`_ | `GitHub <https://github.com/russellballestrini>`_

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To the OpenDP team:

Privacy-preserving software that works at scale requires more than algorithm expertise. It requires engineering discipline: clean APIs, thorough test suites, documentation that serves both researchers & practitioners, & deployment infrastructure that's reproducible. At Mandiant (FireEye), I worked on security infrastructure protecting enterprise & government clients. At Cofense, I worked in SOC2/FedRAMP environments where data handling, access controls, & auditability were requirements. I understand the mindset of building software where data privacy is a first-class constraint, not an afterthought.

I have 15+ years of production Python. I write well-tested, well-documented code. At Remind, I built Python services serving 30M users across 60+ microservices. I've built & maintained open-source Python packages & I understand the discipline required for library code: backwards compatibility, clear documentation, thoughtful API design, & comprehensive test coverage. I've maintained a technical blog for 12+ years communicating complex topics to audiences with varying backgrounds.

At Coursemojo, I built AI-powered content generation systems for education. I built uncloseai-speech, a real-time speech API in FastAPI, & unsandbox.com, a multi-tenant code execution PaaS in Elixir. I understand ML frameworks, training pipelines, & the infrastructure that supports them. While differential privacy is a new domain for me, I learn quickly & I'm genuinely interested in the intersection of privacy & machine learning.

Rust isn't my primary language, but I've worked in polyglot environments my entire career across Python, Elixir, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, & C. I pick up new languages by reading codebases & contributing incrementally. Building privacy tools that enable researchers to work with sensitive data responsibly is important work. I'd welcome the opportunity to contribute.

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Russell Ballestrini
