russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2026-01-05-temporal-technologies-senior-software-engineer-russell-ballestrini.rst

Temporal Technologies - Senior Software Engineer, Infrastructure Observability
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:date: 2026-01-05

.. Applied 2026-01-10

To Temporal:

I built the observability practice at Remind from scratch. When I joined, we had 60+ microservices on ECS with minimal visibility into what was actually happening. I introduced Datadog with EC2 agents for container APM, logs, & custom metrics. Built dashboards that let engineers trace requests across service boundaries. Established alerting strategies that reduced incident response times & gave us early warning before users noticed problems.

Then COVID-19 hit. Distance learning demand exploded & our platform became critical infrastructure for 30M users. The observability foundation I'd built meant we could identify bottlenecks in real-time, scale proactively, & debug production issues without flying blind. We survived that surge because we could see what was happening.

At Coursemojo (2022-2025), I brought the same approach to a smaller team: instrumentation, structured logging, metrics pipelines, & the dashboards that made them useful. At Cofense (2020-2022), observability had compliance dimensions. SOC2/FedRAMP environments meant audit trails, log retention policies, & security-focused monitoring. I understand observability isn't just for debugging; it's for accountability.

What draws me to Temporal's Infrastructure Observability role: you're building the platform that other companies' workflows run on. When something goes wrong, your customers need to understand why. The observability layer isn't a nice-to-have; it's how you build trust. I've been the engineer staring at dashboards during an incident, & I've been the engineer who built those dashboards months earlier. I know what information matters when things break.

15+ years of distributed systems, AWS infrastructure, & Python. I've operated RabbitMQ clusters, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, & the monitoring systems that watch all of them. I want to bring that experience to Temporal.

Russell Ballestrini

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