Craig Booth

Chief Technology Officer

Packback · Chicago, Illinois, United States

Present

As Packback’s CTO, my role has continued to evolve, reflecting an ever-deepening commitment to driving technological innovation, team growth, and product development. Since stepping into this role I have built upon the foundation laid during my tenure as VP of Engineering, focusing on strategic expansion, advanced technological implementations, and fostering an environment where creativity and efficiency thrive. In this capacity, my accomplishments include: • Spearheading the expansion of our engineering team threefold, I have ensured that this growth has not only scaled our capabilities but also enhanced our delivery metrics. • As the visionary and chief architect behind Packback's cutting-edge AI systems, I have led the development and integration of advanced algorithms, machine learning models, and generative AI. These systems are at the heart of our platform's unique value proposition. • Demonstrating an entrepreneurial spirit combined with a knack for innovation, I have successful…

Vp of Engineering

Packback · Greater Chicago Area

Embodying a hybrid profile as an influential executive leader and hands-on engineer, my tenure at Packback has been characterized by robust innovation and a dedication to operational excellence. I am esteemed for my hands-on contributions and executive leadership in facilitating scalable, efficient operations. As a proactive member of the executive team, my strategic achievements include: • Orchestrating the mentorship and management of a high-performance engineering team, instrumental in expanding Packback's platform capabilities. • Pioneering a 24/7 software support on-call rotation to significantly enhance platform reliability and uptime, thus consistently achieving a 99.9% uptime SLA. • Leveraging agile methodologies and introducing Jira to foster a reliable, streamlined workflow, resulting in unprecedented productivity. • Revolutionizing platform deployment process through the adoption of Kubernetes and Docker, shifting from sporadic multi-hour procedures to seamless continuous de…

Director of Engineering

Narrative Science · Greater Chicago Area

• Responsible for multi-year DevOps roadmap. • Collaborated with recruiting to implement rigorous, value-based, reliable (metrics-driven) hiring process for engineers. • Worked alongside our sales team to turn our DevOps and security capabilities into a competitive differentiator. • Day-to-day personnel management of all resources related to security, DevOps, and IT, and engineering support.

Devops Manager

Narrative Science · Greater Chicago Area

Head of infrastructure, security, DevOps, and IT for Narrative Science. I played a multi- faceted role: Application and infrastructure architect; hands-on implementor; manager who recruits, hires and mentors engineers. • Designed and built cloud-based REST API, transforming core platform by growing throughput 100x, cutting costs by 20% all while maintaining 99.99% uptime and serving over half a billion requests in a year. • Helped to drive company towards company-wide SOC-2 compliance, leading to successful SOC-2 type 2 audit. • Decreased the number of oncall alarms from ∼1 per day, to ∼1 per week through hands-on effort, rebuild of monitoring and alerting platform, and documentation of existing systems. • Day-to-day personnel management of all resources related to security, DevOps, and IT, and engineering support.

Data Engineer

Narrative Science · Greater Chicago Area

As a data engineer my primary job was to build data pipelines that transformed high-volumes of client data into a form suitable for ingestion by Narrative Science's AI platform. In addition to this work, I went out of my way to seek out extra responsibilities, which included: • Serving dozens of customers in many different industries, including sports, real estate, marketing, government and finance. • Effectively becoming the DBA for Narrative Science's production databases, leading to a ground-up rebuild, which decreased the number of operational issues from a constant stream to a negligible number. • Building logging and monitoring tools that are still in use by the organization today.

Instructor (Sql)

General Assembly

I teach a two-day bootcamp on SQL which takes absolute beginners through the basics of SQL to an ability to write queries with confidence. Topics covered include: basic queries, subqueries, joins, views, keys, normal forms, and SQL vs. NoSQL

Astrophysicist / Kicp Associate Fellow

University of Chicago · Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

• Contributed to the development of new massively parallel, object oriented numerical codes for the simulation of reactive flows, allowing the modeling of new physical phenomena for the first time. • Led the data visualization efforts for a large international collaboration and succeeded in translating terabytes of raw data into compelling animations that illustrate the story behind the data in an intuitive manner. • Developed models that describe the distribution of gas in the Universe, and compared these models statistically to data. This statistical analysis allowed us to draw conclusions about the nature of galaxies in the early Universe. • I fuel my passion for communicating big ideas with work in public outreach. I have volunteered my time as a science speaker at the Adler planetarium.

Postdoctoral Researcher (Computational Astrophysics)

Leiden University · Leiden Observatory

• Core member of the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations (OWLS) team. • Played a leading role in developing the C code employed in one of the largest cosmological, hydrodynamic simulation projects ever performed, allowing the team to produce groundbreaking scientific papers. • Led a variety of scientific projects on diverse topics and designed, performed and interpreted numerical experiments, publishing multiple high-impact papers. • Made the analysis of huge datasets with high time-resolution possible through the development of novel storage techniques to deal with simulation results that cover many orders of magnitude in spatial and temporal scale.