Forest Leigh

About Forest Leigh

Tech lead and engineer with 9+ years of experience focused on building high-impact…

Experience

1. Senior Software Engineer -- Tech Lead Manager

   SciTec

   Mar 2023 — Present · Boulder, CO, US

   Headed a team of six engineers in the conception, design, development, and deployment of a Python software prototype within 18 months and under an allocated budget, partnering with Customers, Product Owners, Systems Engineering, and Sr. Scientists to ensure architectural alignment and operational transition.• Supported the Futures team to course correct a project timeline by designing and developing a Python MVP in collaboration with Systems Engineering and Sr. Scientists, which reduced delivery time by 8 months.• Responsible for hosting bi-weekly Scrum-of-Scrum meetings to design roadmaps, cross-team project planning, and set KPIs, leveraging Jira and Confluence for documentation and project management.• Spearheaded system design initiatives for several major releases, leveraging Jira and Confluence to architect features such as multi-track-to-track association, object ranking, and sensor scheduling algorithms.• Modernized a legacy internal Python simulation tool from Windows/Docker into a Linux/Podman containerized framework, coordinating with Customers and the Futures team to architect new feature modules and error models supporting future study use cases, delivered within Sprintly resource constraints.• Replaced legacy rules-based algorithms within 3 months by building a benchmarking pipeline (sklearn, sktime, TensorFlow) and tuning Gradient Boost and MiniRocket models with data augmentation, feature engineering, and hyperparameter optimization.• Championed GitLab parent-child pipeline in a core data models library to enforce semantic versioning and enable cross-org code reuse, securing alignment across four developer and infrastructure teams and minimizing CI/CD infrastructure costs.• Overhauled Python regression testing processes and metrics, ensuring explicit rather than implicit testing of critical delivery features, revealing bugs, and leading to more reliable and maintainable code.

Education

• City University of New York-Hunter College

  Bachelor's Degree

• Caltech

  Master's degree