russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2026-01-05-radar-site-reliability-engineer-russell-ballestrini.rst

Radar - Site Reliability Engineer
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:date: 2026-01-05

.. Skipped - surveillance tech, privacy concerns

To Radar:

1 billion+ API calls per day is the kind of scale where infrastructure decisions compound. Every inefficiency multiplies, every optimization pays dividends, & reliability isn't a feature; it's the product. That's the environment where I do my best work.

My experience aligns with your requirements:

**Production AWS via Terraform**: At Remind & Coursemojo, I managed AWS infrastructure using infrastructure-as-code (CloudFormation, Terraform). Built reproducible, auditable deployments across ECS, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, & SQS. At Cofense, worked in security-focused environments (SOC2/FedRAMP) where infrastructure changes required approval workflows & compliance documentation.

**Multi-region Kubernetes**: Managed containerized deployments on ECS/EKS supporting 60+ microservices at Remind. Built for high availability during COVID-19 lockdowns when our messaging platform became critical infrastructure for 30M users in distance learning. Understood the tradeoffs between consistency, availability, & partition tolerance in distributed deployments.

**High-throughput data systems**: While my MongoDB experience is lighter than my PostgreSQL/MySQL background, I've managed Elasticsearch clusters with heavy read-write workloads & understand the patterns for scaling sharded, distributed databases. RabbitMQ infrastructure at Remind handled millions of messages daily with strict delivery guarantees.

**High-growth startup experience**: Remind scaled from millions to tens of millions of users during my tenure. Coursemojo grew from MVP to production AI platform. I've lived through the infrastructure growing pains where yesterday's architecture becomes today's bottleneck.

I care about customer success. The best infrastructure work is invisible to end users, but directly enables their experience. Geolocation is one of those foundational capabilities that powers features users love without them ever thinking about the complexity underneath. I'd be excited to help keep that complexity hidden & reliable.

Russell Ballestrini

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