Paige
Lester

Work Experience

1. Nov 2024 – Present · Waters Corporation

   Engineering Manager

   • Line-managed five to seven developers and testers across permanent staff and contractors, running one-to-ones, performance reviews and hiring
   • Partnered with the Product Owner on multi-week reviews where stakeholders and beta customers tried a major release hands-on, winning back long-unheard users, with the release later described at customer conferences as the biggest improvement in years
   • Handed engineers ownership of technical analysis, challenged their thinking until they reached their own conclusions and encouraged them to work across teams and departments, with two progressing from mid-level to senior
   • Managed delivery of three products at once from one team, where other products in the business had at least one dedicated team, shipping eight releases on time across separate schedules
   • Led a cross-department, two-team pilot opening documentation beyond technical writers, freeing them for higher-priority work in later releases and building the case for a second phase to remove a recurring three-to-six-week documentation and translation bottleneck

2. Mar 2024 – Nov 2024 · Waters Corporation

   Principal Software Engineer

   • Promoted to Principal on the same team and applications, with a remit extending across departments
   • Led the first release of the team's third application from scratch
   • Opened up areas of code to the whole team by introducing a consistent structure of stepped processing workflows, command-query separation and command validation
   • Drove genuine adoption of the UX department's shared UI component library, which was mandated across Waters Connect but barely used in practice, and worked directly with that team to improve the integration path
   • Extended the shared-package programme begun as Senior Engineer into the wider estate
   • Mentored less experienced developers through pairing and mob programming, widening the group of engineers confident to work across all three applications

3. Jan 2023 – Mar 2024 · Waters Corporation

   Senior Software Engineer

   • One of four developers in a seven-person team owning three Waters Connect applications in .NET and Angular, where most teams in the business own one and some share a single application between several teams
   • Absorbed the team's growth from two applications to three with no additional headcount by replacing cloned code with shared packages, the first genuine code sharing across the Waters Connect estate
   • Diagnosed the underlying maintenance problem of code copied between applications and teams, which left quality varying with the age of each copy and engineers routing around areas they could not follow
   • Drove adoption of the shared packages beyond the immediate team to at least four others
   • Rebuilt the processing workflows behind the platform’s algorithms and set the clean-code and maintenance standards the team works to
   • Cut the cost of context switching between applications and made release readiness more predictable; shipped two releases

4. Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 · Caspian

   Senior Developer

   • Squad lead of an agile development team containing Developers, DevOps, Testers and Data Scientists
   • Architecting software for Tier 1 banks in AML investigations in AWS using Docker, Kubernetes, AWS Lambda, s3 buckets, SNS/SQS
   • Setting CI Bitbucket pipelines to ensure code quality with automated testing and SonarCloud and checking for potential vulnerabilities with Snyk
   • Developed microservice communication with message broker RabbitMQ using MassTransit in .NET and pika in Python
   • Setting up automated testing pipelines using Selenium, Cucumber, Wdio and Jira with Xray

5. Dec 2016 – Jan 2022 · Caspian

   Developer

   • Machine Learning engineering translating Data Science research and experimentation into unit tested production quality software in Python including packages such as SkLearn, Tensorflow and Spacy
   • Developed a classifier training pipeline using Luigi supporting SkLearn and Tensorflow models including stages for labelling data, hold out, consensus, preprocessing, training, predicting and model performance reporting
   • Developed customer facing tutorials for bank interface translated into multiple languages and compatible with bidirectionality
   • Developed client facing demos to secure new business using React and Typescript in GCP’s App Engine

6. Dec 2014 – Dec 2016 · Caspian

   Simulation Developer

   • Mentored junior simulation developers
   • Developed simulations for training bank staff in AML investigations
   • Developed simulations for Health and Social Care

7. Aug 2014 – Dec 2014 · Caspian

   Quality Assurance Analyst

   • Manual testing simulations
   • Bug reporting in Jira
   • Simulation developer training