russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2026-01-25-phantom-senior-backend-engineer-money-movement-russell-ballestrini.rst

Russell Ballestrini
===================

.. class:: center

**Senior Software Engineer, Backend (Money Movement) | Phantom**

.. class:: center

russell@unturf.com | `russell.ballestrini.net <https://russell.ballestrini.net>`_ | `GitHub <https://github.com/russellballestrini>`_

----

To the Phantom team:

I've built the thing you're hiring someone to build.

At Make Post Sell, I designed & shipped hot wallet payment processing for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin, & Monero. Real money movement: auto-quoting cart totals, handling blockchain confirmations, managing the reliability challenges that come with irreversible transactions. I understand what it takes to make crypto payments feel dependable.

**Crypto payment integrations in production:**

- `blog.makepostsell.com/how-to-accept-monero-payments <https://blog.makepostsell.com/c/91d9119d-9c8e-11f0-9d98-02dfe05770ee/how-to-accept-monero-payments>`_ - Monero integration with automated cash register, risk thresholds, & cold wallet sweeps
- `unsandbox.com/pricing <https://unsandbox.com/pricing>`_ - Code execution API accepting XMR, DOGE, BTC, LTC with refund address management
- `git.unturf.com/make_post_sell <https://git.unturf.com/engineering/make-post-sell/make_post_sell>`_ - Open-sourced to public domain

**What I bring:**

- Direct crypto payment integration experience with hot wallets across 4 chains
- Your "nice to have" list is my core skillset: Kubernetes, AWS ops, CI/CD, observability
- SRE expertise scaling systems for millions of users (Remind during COVID lockdowns)
- Real-time features with websockets, Socket.IO, & server-sent events for streaming dynamic updates
- Security engineering background (Mandiant, Cofense) with SOC2/FedRAMP experience
- 15+ years shipping production systems, 12+ years remote

My primary stack is Python, not Node.js. But I've shipped production JavaScript, understand event-driven architectures (queues, retries, idempotency), & know the distributed systems patterns that matter more than syntax. The blockchain integration & money movement reliability problems are the hard parts. I've already solved those.

I'm a Phantom user. The Firefox extension is how I interact with Solana. I want to help make it better from the inside.

|

Russell Ballestrini