Christopher Lester

Experience

• 

  Microsoft

  Jul 1997 - Dec 2015

  Test discipline leader for Fresh Paint. Built and managed both onshore and offshore vendor teams and a full time test team for Fresh Paint, a native DirectX WinRT app (website, in store) as well as being the project lead for Test. This includes various (and numerous) VP reviews representing Test, owning the test schedule, owning the budget for Test, owning (as a member of the project trio) feature reviews and cut lists, etc. In addition, carried a full workload for the test team (our management team was hands on and reviewed on what you personally contributed). Show less I was a technical lead for the Deployment Platform team in the Windows Core Operating Systems Division, which was an architectural team responsible for looking broadly at Windows Deployment technologies. The team goal was to design and deliver a cohesive API surface that will enable Windows deployment scenarios through Windows 10. Practically speaking, this involved scenario definition and requirements gathering, architectural design work, starting and managing incubation efforts and setting the planning direction for the feature teams in the proposed platform. I wrote a case study on Testability in the platform and generic principles of testability, as well as whitepapers around Diagnostics as some outputs of this team (in addition to my lead responsibilities).Other responsibilities include working on quality initiatives regarding logging and diagnostics and reviewing Test planning across the organization.Windows Vista – UpgradeResponsible for driving Upgrade testing broadly across the Windows organization.Windows 7 – Single SKUThe user scenario exposed by Windows Anytime Upgrade and a change in how we build Windows (affects everyone). Highly impactful feature requirement a large amount of cross group work with partners and dependencies in addition to test problems around validating SKU content, policies and configuration.Windows 7 – Reducing the size of Windows SKUsWorked with PMs and teams across Windows to drive up performance on low performing hardware (netbooks) and driving down the size of the Windows footprint. Technical investigations into the effects of compression on the system volume or parts of it (such as Fonts) were also done. Show less Responsibilities and positions changed several times over the years. The initial position was mostly technical debug and code work, and in later years added more management and PM type work. I worked with several different products as an EE - including Windows ME, MSMail, Exchange, Office, and the Windows Platforms (NT3.51-Longhorn). All required close interaction with the QFE teams for those products, interaction with the hotfix release processes and a deep technical expertise in the product (understanding of the architecture, ability to root cause, etc). Show less

  • Sr. Software Engineer

    Oct 2014 - Dec 2015

  • Sr. Software Design Engineer in Test

    Oct 2013 - Oct 2014

  • Test Manager

    Apr 2011 - Oct 2013

  • Sr. Software Design Engineer in Test

    Sept 2010 - Apr 2011

  • Sr. Software Design Engineer in Test

    May 2006 - Oct 2010

  • Sr. Escalation Engineer

    Jul 1997 - Apr 2006
• 

  SangenSoft LLC

  Mar 2015 - Aug 2018

  Founder

  Specializing in test planning, infrastructure and tools, and analytics for software and software/hardware hybrid solutions.

• 

  Vega Consulting

  Dec 2015 - Jan 2017

  Consultant

  Interviewed and trained the consultant team working on the Orbitz and CheapTickets onboarding. Web full stack software development used globally by Expedia brands for booking agents (ASP.Net MVC [Javascript, Razor, C#], Java services).

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  Expedia Group

  Jan 2017 - Nov 2018

  Senior Software Developer

  Full Stack development. Working on Javascript/Typescript browser client, ASP.NET MVC5 , C# front end and middle tier, with Java back-end services connecting dozens of downstream system. Technical lead for the team responsible for on boarding partners such as Orbitz, CheapTickets, and various bank partners to the Expedia platforms. Our work mainly consists of feature work across Expedia's agent technology platform required to meet partner business requirements. These can be as diverse as the creating infrastructure for service fees (globally) to authentication requirements for specific customers. Show less

• 

  Sinclair Broadcast Group

  Nov 2018 - Aug 2020

  Principal Engineer

  I'm the principal architect (one of two) and lead engineer for the content management system supporting Sinclair's news syndication on the web (196 websites+), the pagebuilder for those sites, content ingest from our media partners, and video processing (transcoding/slicing/drm/etc.) for the Tennis Channel and STIRR and the soon to launch Marquee network. We are currently doing some exciting new things in my next generation architecture for this domain, which is based around event sourcing with Kafka and uses a Clojure stack (stream processing / data transformations, and good concurrency tools). To accomodate the switch to a microservice architecture I've modernized the design our CICD process to move to a Gitlab -> Kubernetes deployment model from Jenkins->ECS. In addition, I lead the team that tackles technical debt in our existing frameworks doing things like replacing the legacy task execution framework with much more efficient design, decomposing the monoliths to improve the dev cycle and isolation, etc. Show less

• 

  Microsoft

  Aug 2020 - Nov 2021

  Principal Software Engineering Manager

  Managing an amazing team of folks tackling privileged access management and providing a solution to secure your credentials, roles and permissions at rest. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/privileged-identity-management/pim-configure

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  Tableau

  Dec 2021 - Mar 2023

  Software Architect

  • Lead efforts to improve engineering quality, review architectural designs with other architects to identify and address quality concerns and serve as an advocate and a path forward. • Oversaw large-scale efforts, including a test impact analysis adoption, developer friction reduction (optimization of the SDLC process as an algorithm), standards for quality planning, feature flag process changes, education on quality during design and implementation phases, Telemetry as Debugging and education and consulting with teams. Show less

• 

  EngrammicAI

  Jan 2023 - now

  Co-Founder

  We are focused on bringing AI and its capabilities to those of us who think differently. On making executive dysfunction functional through AI tools for the neurospicy. If you are interested in knowing more or signing up to give feedback please let me know.

• 

  Walmart Global Tech

  Sept 2024 - Dec 2024

  Clojure Developer
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  Kiddom

  Dec 2024 - now

  Head of Infrastructure