Stephen Lester

Bolt · San Francisco, CA

• Led Platform, DevOps, Compliance Engineering, and SRE organizations — 75+ engineers across US, India, Central America, and Europe — driving Bolt's evolution from e-commerce infrastructure to a regulated fintech and crypto-ready payments platform.
• Built and scaled distributed teams of FTEs and contractors, introducing clear ownership models, blameless culture, and measurable delivery performance through DORA metrics and SLO reviews.
• Defined the global Platform vision and DevOps strategy, integrating AWS/GCP, GitOps, Kubernetes, Vault, and observability into a unified developer platform supporting PCI, SOC2, and crypto custody compliance.
• Partnered with Compliance and Risk to deliver a Compliance Management System automating KYC, AML, and sanctions checks via Persona, ChainDots, DataSpike, and Sardine APIs for fiat ↔ crypto workflows.
• Established error-budget-driven reliability management and a company-wide Center of Platform Excellence (COPE) to align SRE practices with fast flow, feedback, and continuous learning.
• Directed API gateway and rate-limiting initiatives to safeguard financial workloads during peak trading events and load spikes.
• Reported directly to CTO; partnered with CCO, CISO, CPO, and VPs to define platform product strategy, cost optimization, and compliance readiness.

Ripple Labs · Denver, CO

• First Platforms engineer for RippleX, promoted to Interim Director — built and led the function owning Cloud (AWS/GCP), DevOps, InfoSec, and Platforms for RippleX engineering across on-chain payments, NFT, Side Chains, and crypto services, including XRPL Validator support.
• Delivered secure, compliant payment systems aligned with AML, KYC, and ISO 27001 for high-volume fiat and digital-asset transactions across multiple jurisdictions.
• Built and directed DevOps platform introducing GitHub Actions CI/CD, Grafana Cloud observability and alerting, and container orchestration — cutting deployment cycles 70% for 110+ engineers.
• Drove $1.3M+ annual AWS savings within a $22M cloud budget through infrastructure optimization and right-sizing.
• Initial platform engineer on Ripple's CBDC pilot — designed and built PCI-compliant, Terraform-based infrastructure powering real-money transfers between a U.S. bank and the Republic of Palau on the XRP Ledger.
• Drove initiatives improving operational resilience, change management, and auditability, preparing systems for regulatory inspection and enterprise client onboarding.
• Mentored Staff/Senior engineers; shaped team working agreements, standards, and policies for the 2023 operating plan and budget.

Wowza Media Systems · Denver, CO

• Migrated Wowza Player and Wowza Streaming Engine from Jenkins to CircleCI, cutting build times from 4 hours to 45 minutes (with tests) and ~15 minutes without.
• Converted legacy Jenkins pipelines to infrastructure-as-code using Docker, GitOps repos, and Kubernetes; coached teams on migrating workloads from compute instances to containers.
• Implemented DevSecOps in CI/CD by adding license and vulnerability scanning gates to reduce security risk in production.
• Created developer-facing documentation and training, enabling teams to self-serve CI/CD changes.
• Designed and built internal tools in Ruby, JavaScript, Terraform, Bash, and Go — including a production monitoring app for transcoders and Wowza Cloud to detect and respond to outages.

Burnin Media · Denver, CO

• Founded and grew an IT consulting firm specializing in software and infrastructure engineering for enterprise and SMB clients, delivering cloud, server, and web solutions.
• Built web applications that improved digital marketing performance, helping clients recapture ROI and increase customer conversions.
• Led full-stack development using AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, Lambda, VPC, API Gateway) on the back end and Node.js and React on the front end.