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MagicSchool - Staff Software Engineer - AI
===========================================
:date: 2025-10-28
:slug: magicschool-staff-software-engineer-ai-cover-letter
I'm excited to apply for the Staff Software Engineer - AI position at MagicSchool. With over 15 years building & scaling distributed systems—including 3 years at Coursemojo developing AI-powered educational tools for public schools—I bring the exact blend of technical depth & educational domain expertise this role demands. At Coursemojo, I designed CI/CD pipelines for AI microservices, scaled language model integrations (OpenAI & Anthropic), & built teacher dashboards for real-time student activity control. I've lived the challenges of deploying AI in K-12 environments & understand how to balance innovation with the safety & reliability teachers need. My experience architecting sandboxed execution environments (AWS ECS, Docker, Firecracker) & managing multi-LLM orchestration directly aligns with MagicSchool's agent architecture goals.
As a long-time GitLab power user, I've built & maintained self-hosted GitLab infrastructure managing all my production systems—from remarkbox.com to makepostsell.com to uncloseai.com. I use GitLab CI runners in every repository to drive automated builds, tests, & deployments, giving me deep operational knowledge of CI/CD orchestration, runner architecture, & containerized workflows. This hands-on experience with GitLab's internals—combined with my AWS infrastructure expertise (CloudFormation, ECS, Lambda)—positions me to make immediate contributions to your deployment pipelines & agent execution infrastructure. I've also open-sourced complete SaaS platforms (Remarkbox, Make Post Sell), demonstrating my commitment to building transparent, maintainable systems that scale.
What excites me most about MagicSchool is the mission alignment: I've spent years building tools that directly impact how teachers teach & students learn. At Coursemojo, I saw firsthand how thoughtful AI tooling can amplify teacher effectiveness without replacing the human connection that makes education work. I'm eager to bring my staff-level systems thinking, educational product experience, & passion for AI safety to help MagicSchool serve its 6 million teachers.

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Technologies: AWS (ECS, EC2, SQS, RDS, DynamoDB), GNU/Linux, Python, Ruby, CloudFormation
Founder
^^^^^^^
**Remarkbox** - Remote | 02/2016 - Present
Created and scaled a hosted comment service focusing on privacy and ad-free user experience.
Key Achievements:
- Bootstrapped the service from concept to profitable product.
- Open-sourced the entire SaaS codebase.
Technologies: GNU/Linux, Python, Pyramid, SQLAlchemy, Nginx
Earlier Career Highlights
-------------------------
- **Senior System Engineer** at Mobiquity (06/2016 - 06/2017)
- **DevOps Engineer** at Mandiant (07/2014 - 05/2016)
- **Founder** at Remarkbox | 02/2016 - Present
- **System Engineer** at Cars.com (10/2012 - 06/2014)
- **Founder** of LinkPeek (01/2012 - 01/2022)
- **Unix System Administrator** at CSC (08/2006 - 10/2012)
@ -110,22 +98,17 @@ Three Rivers Community College | 2003 - 2006
Technical Skills
----------------
**Operating Systems**: GNU/Linux, Debian, Redhat, Alpine
**Programming**: Python, Bash, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Go, Java
**Cloud**: AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean
**DevOps**: Gitlab, SaltStack, Ansible, Packer, Docker, Kubernetes, Firecracker, KVM, libvirt, gitlab-ci runners
**Databases**: Sqlite3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB
**Web**: Flask, Pyramid, uWSGI, Nginx, Apache, Caddy, Websockets, OpenAPI,
- **Operating Systems**: GNU/Linux, Debian, Redhat, Alpine
- **Programming**: Python, Bash, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Go, Java
- **Cloud**: AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean
- **DevOps**: Gitlab, SaltStack, Ansible, Packer, Docker, Kubernetes, Firecracker, KVM, libvirt, gitlab-ci runners
- **Databases**: Sqlite3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB
- **Web**: Flask, Pyramid, uWSGI, Nginx, Apache, Caddy, Websockets, OpenAPI,
Additional Information
----------------------
- Remarkbox: https://www.remarkbox.com
- Make Post Sell: https://www.makepostsell.com
- Remarkbox: https://www.remarkbox.com
- uncloseai.com: https://uncloseai.com
- self-hosted gitlab repos: https://git.unturf.com/engineering/