About

Lisa Kester is a highly skilled SRE and software engineer with over 15 years of relevant experience. She possesses a broad cloud architecture, infrastructure, and software engineering background, combined with collaborative leadership skills to lead and execute projects with success. Lisa is a leader who enjoys coaching and sharing knowledge to help people improve alongside technology. She is using her expertise to build applications with scalability, availability, and reliability while reducing cost. Currently, Lisa is working as a Sr. SRE / MLOps Engineer at Twitter, where she is collaborating across multiple teams to create tools to support the notifications platform and their Machine Learning model development that brings millions of users interesting content each day. Additionally, she is collaborating with SREs to provide leadership, educate engineers, recommend oncall process improvements, automate toil, and increase observability across the notifications department. Lisa has previously worked as a Principal Cloud Engineer - SRE at Athena Health, where she architected and led solutions to manage core infrastructure services that supported the main customer-facing application with over 6,000 servers and engineers across the company. She also acted as a leader by driving the proxy and DNS migration projects and delegating work while mentoring seven contractors to help them learn their tools and processes. Lisa has collaborated across teams to design and script a user-friendly Jenkins pipeline in Groovy to automate the deployment of Nagios alerts that provide monitoring to thousands of servers. Lisa has also worked as an AWS Cloud Engineer, Principal Associate at Capital One, where she created automation to support continuous delivery of multiple cloud applications for various development teams. She led learning sessions, created sample templates, and mentored across multiple teams to educate developers on AWS and deployment automation, resulting in development teams independently deploying cloud applications with CloudFormation/Terraform, Jenkins, and Chef. Lisa holds a BS in Applied Computer Graphics from California State University, Chico, where she studied Computer Science, Math, and 3D Computer Modeling, and an Associate of Science (A.S.) in Computer Science from Sierra College. Her technical skills include SRE, Software Engineer, infra, AWS, ML, test, Puppet, Jenkins, Terraform, New Relic, CI/CD, and Backend.