russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2026-01-17-lumos-devops-engineer-russell-ballestrini.rst

Lumos - DevOps Engineer
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:date: 2026-01-17

.. Applied 2026-01-18

To the Lumos team:

Identity governance is one of those problems that compounds. Every new app, every role change, every offboarding creates access sprawl. Building the infrastructure that handles this at scale for companies like MongoDB & Pinterest requires serious DevOps work. That's what I do.

**AWS & cloud infrastructure**: EC2, ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, Lambda, CloudFormation. At Remind, built infrastructure supporting 30M users across 60+ microservices. At Coursemojo, ran Fargate-based services with auto-scaling & cost optimization. Currently building unsandbox.com on AWS with container orchestration & multi-tenant isolation.

**Terraform & IaC**: CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, SaltStack. At Cofense (2020-2022), worked in SOC2/FedRAMP environments where infrastructure needed to be reproducible, auditable, & version-controlled. Identity & access management products need that same rigor.

**Kubernetes & containers**: ECS/EKS deployments throughout my career. Docker containerization, orchestration, resource management. At Remind, managed container infrastructure that kept critical services running during COVID-19 traffic spikes.

**CI/CD & automation**: GitHub Actions, Jenkins, ArgoCD patterns. Designed & implemented pipelines at multiple companies. Strong bias toward automation. If something runs more than twice, it should be scripted.

**Observability**: Introduced Datadog at both Remind (EC2 agents) & Coursemojo (Fargate sidecars). APM, logs, custom metrics, SLO definition. Understanding how to instrument systems so engineers can debug production issues fast.

**Python proficiency**: 15+ years. Comfortable contributing to large codebases. Currently building unsandbox.com, a multi-tenant code execution PaaS in Elixir.

Building infrastructure for identity governance at enterprise scale is exactly the kind of challenge I'm looking for.

Russell Ballestrini

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