russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2026-01-05-hatchet-founding-engineer-russell-ballestrini.rst

Hatchet - Founding Engineer
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:date: 2026-01-05

.. Applied 2026-01-10

To the Hatchet team:

I've been the engineer debugging why a background job silently failed at 3am. I've written the custom retry logic, the dead letter queue handlers, & the monitoring dashboards that Hatchet makes unnecessary. Building the infrastructure layer that lets other engineers focus on their actual problems is exactly the work I find most satisfying.

At Remind, I managed RabbitMQ infrastructure handling millions of messages for 30M users. The complexity of ensuring reliable message delivery across 60+ microservices taught me why purpose-built task orchestration matters. Every team had slightly different retry strategies, timeout handling, & failure modes. A unified platform like Hatchet would have saved us countless hours of duplicated effort & subtle bugs.

My background spans the stack you're building on: PostgreSQL (schema design, query optimization, replication at scale), Kubernetes (ECS/EKS deployments, container orchestration), & distributed systems patterns from years of AWS infrastructure work. While Go isn't my primary language, I've worked in polyglot environments my entire career (Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java) & pick up new languages quickly. I've read enough Go to understand Hatchet's codebase & I'm genuinely excited to go deeper.

What draws me to Hatchet specifically: you're building in the open. I've bootstrapped two SaaS products (Remarkbox, Make Post Sell) & open-sourced significant portions of my work. I understand the dynamics of building for developers who can read your code, file issues, & hold you accountable. It's a different kind of pressure than enterprise software, & I thrive in it.

I'm looking for a founding role where I can own significant technical surface area & work directly with users. The combination of hard distributed systems problems, open-source community, & small team building something essential to modern infrastructure is exactly what I want.

Russell Ballestrini

https://russell.ballestrini.net | https://github.com/russellballestrini