russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2025-11-03-lumin-digital-sre-russell-ballestrini.rst

Lumin Digital - Senior Site Reliability Engineer
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:date: 2025-11-03

To Lumin Digital:

I have over 15 years of infrastructure automation & systems reliability experience which positioned me well for the Senior SRE role at Lumin Digital. At Remind (2017-2020), I served as Lead Software Engineer with SRE responsibilities—managing AWS infrastructure for 60+ Ubuntu microservices, ensuring critical services scaled during COVID-19 lockdowns supporting millions of teachers & students. I introduced Datadog with EC2 agents for container APM, logs, & custom metrics, establishing monitoring & alerting strategies that reduced incident response times. CI/CD expertise includes designing GitHub Actions pipelines at Coursemojo for two monolithic services & contributing to SlashDeploy at Remind (Ruby-based tool enabling GitHub deployments via Slack commands, pioneering automation before modern CI/CD platforms existed). Infrastructure-as-code proficiency spans CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, & SaltStack—eliminating manual tasks through automation aligns with my career-long focus on operational efficiency.

AWS expertise runs deep: ECS, EC2, Fargate, RDS, SQS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, ALB, & multi-region deployments. Kubernetes experience dates back to 2017—implemented multi-region clusters at Mobiquity for customer Selenium Grid spanning USA & China AWS regions, published blog posts on minikube & K8s troubleshooting. Docker & containerization knowledge demonstrated through webwords (creating Docker images for 42 programming languages) & production container orchestration at Remind & Coursemojo. Configuration management includes Ansible & SaltStack for fleet management. Networking fundamentals (HTTP, DNS, TCP/IP, Load Balancing) combined with security mindset from 2 years at Cofense implementing SOC2 & FedRAMP compliance. Python proficiency enables writing automation scripts, infrastructure tooling, & self-healing systems. I've participated in on-call rotations, understand the importance of resilient systems that minimize alerts, & thrive on solving complex problems through automation.

Lumin Digital's focus on cloud-native banking solutions & continuous improvement resonates deeply. Building 100% cloud-native infrastructure eliminates legacy constraints & unlocks full AWS advantages—a philosophy I've practiced throughout my career. The opportunity to design CI/CD pipelines, maintain SLOs, collaborate with software engineers on reliability concerns, & mentor junior team members would leverage both my technical depth & leadership experience. Capacity planning, demand forecasting, & proactive performance optimization align with my work scaling systems during critical moments (COVID-19 lockdowns). I'd love to apply my SRE experience, AWS expertise, & automation-first mindset to help Lumin Digital deliver exceptional reliability & scalability for credit unions & banks. Creating resilient, self-healing systems that improve on-call experiences while maintaining security & data integrity is exactly the kind of challenge that drives me.

Russell Ballestrini