Paige
Lester

Work

1. Nov 2024 – Present · Waters Corporation

   Engineering Manager

   • Line manager to five — four developers and the team's tech lead — on the team I previously worked in as Senior and Principal Engineer
   • Progressed two engineers from mid-level to senior through structured mentoring, handing over technical analysis and stepping back to let them reach their own conclusions
   • Driving a cross-department pilot, without line authority, to remove a documentation and translation bottleneck adding three to six weeks to the end of every release
   • Won buy-in from that department by supplying the technical capability they lacked rather than imposing process: moving them toward docs-as-code, continuous translation and AI style-guide-driven pre-review in place of sequential manual gates
   • Managed delivery of three Waters Connect applications against three separate release schedules with a single team, where most teams in the business carry one; shipped 8 releases
   • Partnered with the Product Owner to run a multi-week customer feedback programme on a major release, rebuilding confidence among users who had long felt unheard — described at customer conferences as the biggest improvement to the application in years

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
   • Drove genuine adoption of the UX department's shared UI component library — 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: code copied between applications and teams, leaving quality that varied 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