Russell has been a core developer on the Django project since January 2006. He was a co-founder of Django Evolution, a schema evolution framework for Django. He is an active participant on the Django Users and Django Developers mailing lists, and was a mentor in the 2008, 2009 and 2010 Google Summers of Code.

In addition to his work with Django, Russell has worked at a series of startup companies. His current employer is Wotnews, an online service that monitors news from thousands of sources across Australia including the major news networks, blogs, corporate newsletters, government and industry news publications. Wotnews sells enterprise level news aggregation and search services to major Australian companies.

Russell lives with his wife, son, daughter, and two cats in Perth, Western Australia.