Sean Russell

Sean Russell

Full-stack engineer · Schenectady, NY

seanrusselldev.comhello@seanrusselldev.comlinkedin.com/in/sean-russell-professionalgithub.com/TurbulentRice

Full-stack engineer with five years shipping and running production systems at bbb.org and Comcast, across frontend, backend, data, SRE and DevOps. Leads work that crosses the stack: retiring a legacy data pipeline, building production monitoring that found failures only real users could see, and cutting cache traffic 70-80% with a four-file change. Measures before and after changing anything, communicates clearly, and works with AI tools every day.

Experience

  1. Jan 2024 - Present

    Full Stack Developer

    Better Business Bureau (IABBB - bbb.org) · Arlington, VA

    Engineer on bbb.org, working across the main application, its data pipeline, observability and CI/CD.

    • Synthetic monitoring. Primary engineer for probes that act like real users on production every 15 minutes, with on-call alerts, CI/CD integration and an internal releases app. Found a defect that had silently broken 2.8% of page renders for over a year; failing probe runs fell from 5.4% to 0.7% after the fix.
    • Legacy data pipeline. Owned the move of business profiles from Solr to PostgreSQL, then built the Organizations side of an event-driven connector that replaced the legacy push pipeline: shadow runs, feature-flag cutovers, and a reconciliation job that repairs stale data on demand. 44 production releases; about 52k organization syncs a day.
    • Request-scoped cache. Designed a memoization layer in front of the shared Valkey cache that cut its network traffic by 70-80% and its CPU by about half, with no caller changes; category search went from 490 to 330 ms.
    • Observability. Gave the team's services consistent Prometheus metrics, health checks, Sentry reporting, and Grafana dashboards. The render metrics later proved the root cause of an outage every dashboard had shown as healthy.
    • New frontend and CMS. Took the new React frontend to production and turned its Storyblok CMS schemas into reviewed code that CI promotes from dev to prod.
    • Platform. Built the release CLI the team uses to cut, patch and promote releases, and architected a cache invalidation service using SNS/SQS fan-out and Terraform. Built a containerized sentiment-analysis service for complaint text on Kubernetes.

  2. Feb 2021 - Dec 2023

    Software Engineer

    Comcast · Troy, NY

    Full-stack engineer on managed Wi-Fi products for hotels, arenas and campuses.

    • Xfinity NOW Wi-Fi Pass. Lead frontend developer for a new hotspot product that sold 33,459 passes in its first month; wrote the APIs behind its purchase-to-expiration email journey.
    • Captive portals. Designed and built custom landing pages for customers including Wyndham, Four Seasons, Cedar Fair, the San Francisco Giants and the University of Alabama.
    • Reliability and cloud. Hardened internal monitoring and support tools against third-party outages (Flask, Celery, SNMP), supported the migration from on-premises servers to AWS and Azure, and implemented authentication with RADIUS, SSO, OAuth and JWT.
    • Mentoring. Mentored a junior developer and an intern in APIs, deployment and frontend development.

  3. Jul 2015 - Present

    Owner

    Sean Russell Photography · Troy, NY

    Portrait, wedding and event photography across the Northeast; tens of thousands of images edited and archived, which is where AutoLight started.

  4. Earlier

    • Senior Photographer, New York State Assembly, 2016-2021
    • Computer Specialist, GCOM Software, 2013-2014

Projects

  1. 2025-present

    AutoLight

    autolight.ai

    A desktop app that learns a photographer's editing style from their Lightroom catalogs and delivers it back into Lightroom. Designed and built solo; in early access.

    • Electron and React app over a Python/PyTorch ML core, joined by a typed JSONL contract; edits are written as Lightroom's own virtual copies into a validated copy of the catalog.
    • Tested against every Lightroom Classic catalog version from 6 to 15; 1,600+ automated tests, including Playwright driving the real app.

Skills

Languages
TypeScript, JavaScript, C#, Python, SQL, PHP
Frontend
React, TanStack, Next.js, Astro, Tailwind, Playwright
Backend and data
Node, .NET, Express, Flask, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Elasticsearch, Solr, RabbitMQ, Valkey/Redis
Infrastructure
AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, ArgoCD, Cloudflare, Linux
Observability
Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Sentry
AI
Claude Code, Codex, PyTorch

Education

  1. May 2015

    BA, Communication, Journalism and Media

    State University of New York at Geneseo · Geneseo, NY

  2. Jun 2020 - May 2021

    Continuing education: JavaScript frameworks, Python for data analytics

    CanCode Communities · Albany, NY