russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2025-10-28-magicschool-russell-ballestrini.rst

MagicSchool - Staff Software Engineer - AI
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:date: 2025-10-28

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.