russell.ballestrini.net/content/pages/cover-letters/2026-01-27-illumen-group-developer-senior-russell-ballestrini.rst

Russell Ballestrini
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**Developer, Senior | Illumen Group**

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

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To the Illumen Group team:

Modernizing federal systems from legacy to cloud-native on AWS is exactly the kind of work I've done throughout my career. At Remind, I built AWS infrastructure supporting 30M users & 60+ microservices using EC2, ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS, Lambda, & CloudFormation. I led cloud cost optimization while maintaining reliability during COVID-19 usage spikes when the education platform became critical infrastructure. Currently I'm building unsandbox.com, a multi-tenant code execution PaaS in Elixir on AWS with containerized components.

I've written production Python for 15+ years across web services, data processing, & infrastructure automation. At Remind, I shipped Python services handling education communication at national scale. I've built APIs in FastAPI, Flask, & Pyramid, & I write clean, tested, well-documented code. My SQL & database expertise runs deep. PostgreSQL schema design, query optimization, migrations, & replication at scale. I've translated complex business logic into relational models & written the SQL to make them performant.

I've containerized applications, built CI/CD pipelines, & managed production container orchestration on both ECS & Kubernetes. At Cofense, I worked in SOC2/FedRAMP environments where auditability, compliance, & reproducible builds were requirements. At Mandiant (FireEye), I worked on security infrastructure for federal & enterprise clients. I understand the rigor federal work demands.

I'm a U.S. citizen & I'm looking for impactful work modernizing systems that serve the public. Federal statistical systems are exactly that kind of meaningful infrastructure.

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Russell Ballestrini