russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2025-11-30-virta-health-senior-site-reliability-engineer-russell-ballestrini.rst

**Russell Ballestrini**

russell@unturf.com | 860-333-3047 | https://russell.ballestrini.net

November 30, 2025

**Virta Health**

**Re: Senior Site Reliability Engineer**

To the Virta Health Hiring Team:

Top 3 reasons my experience aligns with building reliable infrastructure for transforming diabetes care:

**1. SRE at scale with observability expertise**: At Remind (2017-2020), led infrastructure for 60+ microservices supporting 30M users during COVID-19 lockdowns when distance learning demand exploded. Introduced Datadog with EC2 agents for container APM, logs, & custom metrics, building dashboards that exposed performance bottlenecks & enabled proactive incident response. Optimized infrastructure configurations, reduced latency across services handling millions of requests, & monitored performance metrics (throughput, latency, error rates) to ensure SLA compliance. At Coursemojo (2022-2025), introduced Datadog with Fargate sidecar agents for APM, logging, & custom metrics on AI-powered educational services. This hands-on experience implementing observability platforms & building SLO dashboards directly translates to Virta's AI-driven observability projects & incident readiness improvements.

**2. Infrastructure-as-code, automation & reducing operational toil**: Built infrastructure-as-code solutions using Python & CloudFormation/Stacker at Remind, automating provisioning pipelines & deployment processes. Designed CI/CD pipelines at Coursemojo using AWS CloudFormation & GitHub Actions for automated deployments across multiple environments. Contributed to SlashDeploy tool for GitHub deployments via Slack commands, pioneering deployment automation before modern CI/CD platforms. Proficient in Python, Go, & scripting for automation. While my IaC experience is primarily CloudFormation, I understand Terraform concepts & can quickly adapt (both are declarative IaC tools managing cloud resources). This automation mindset & experience shipping high-quality tooling ensures I can build self-healing workflows & reduce toil across Virta's infrastructure.

**3. Compliance, security & scalable system design**: At Cofense (2020-2022), spearheaded SOC2 & FedRAMP compliance initiatives, managing AWS account controls, vulnerability scanning (ECR), & security automation. Built disaster recovery strategies, backup solutions, & access management frameworks ensuring data protection & regulatory compliance. Architected scalable infrastructure using ECS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, & S3, ensuring critical services stayed online during unprecedented traffic spikes. At Coursemojo, scaled AI-powered educational tools while maintaining security for 60,000+ public school students. This experience designing scalable, observable systems while meeting strict security & compliance requirements aligns perfectly with Virta's need to move fast while meeting healthcare compliance standards (HIPAA, SOC2) for diabetes care platforms.

The opportunity to build infrastructure that helps reverse type 2 diabetes combines technical challenge with meaningful healthcare impact. Virta's mission resonates strongly. I've spent my career building systems that empower users (educators reaching students, creators selling products, developers accessing ML models). I'm excited to bring my SRE expertise, observability experience, & automation mindset to help Virta transform diabetes care at scale.

Sincerely,

Russell Ballestrini