Jason Crawford

Current

• Software Design Engineer at Pelago

Past

• Team Lead at Amazon.com
• Research Engineer and Business Developer at D. E. Shaw Research and Development, LLC
• Research Intern at Akamai Technologies

• Research Intern at Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research
• Undergraduate Researcher at CMU Parallel Data Lab
• High School Intern at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

see less...

3 more...

Education

• Carnegie Mellon University

Recommended

7 people have recommended Jason

Connections

249 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Jason Crawford’s Summary

Entrepreneurial mind with a strong technical background, including a CS degree from CMU and research experience in parallel and distributed computing. Founded the Landing Page Optimization team at Amazon. Experience managing people, projects, and products. Able to fill in where necessary with everything from scripting to UI design to Excel hacking to contract negotiation.

Interested in finding superstar software engineers for Pelago, the makers of Whrrl.

Jason Crawford’s Specialties:

People, product, and program management; talent sourcing and recruiting; writing and speaking; quantitative analysis; computer science; software development.

Jason Crawford’s Experience

• Software Design Engineer

  Pelago

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

  February 2007 — Present (1 year 9 months)

  Pelago is the maker of Whrrl, an application that lets you explore places and events near you, pulling in ratings, reviews, and other activity from your social network. Use it to find a place for dinner, or to tell your friends about your favorite bookstore. Check it out: http://www.whrrl.com.
  
  Also, we're hiring--join us! http://www.pelago.com

• Team Lead

  Amazon.com

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; AMZN; Computer Software industry)

  November 2004 — January 2007 (2 years 3 months)

  Founded the Landing Page Optimization team, which focuses on the first page view in each customer visit. Built the team from scratch: defined the mission and key business metrics, hired and trained the engineers, defined and managed projects, established team software development process.
  
  Before that, was a PM and SDE on the Automated Advertising team, which writes the software that places and manages sponsored links for Amazon products on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

• Research Engineer and Business Developer

  D. E. Shaw Research and Development, LLC

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Research industry)

  June 2001 — October 2004 (3 years 5 months)

  Primary project was a venture led by David E. Shaw to build a new supercomputing architecture for modeling and simulation of biomolecules. Coordinated the architectural specification of one subsystem of the core ASIC for this architecture; managed vendor selection and negotiated associated multi-million dollar contracts. Previous projects included discovering and evaluating new business opportunities for D. E. Shaw’s India office.

• Research Intern

  Akamai Technologies

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; AKAM; Computer Networking industry)

  May 2000 — August 2000 (4 months)

  Investigated certain aspects of the structure of the Internet; developed algorithms to automatically analyze network structure. Research findings and algorithms became part of architecture of next-generation "mapping" system.

• Research Intern

  Caltech Center for Advanced Computing Research

  (Educational Institution; 51-200 employees; Research industry)

  May 1998 — August 1999 (1 year 4 months)

  Summer '98 and '99. Developed a kernel-space distributed shared memory system for Beowulf architectures.

• Undergraduate Researcher

  CMU Parallel Data Lab

  (Educational Institution; 11-50 employees; Research industry)

  September 1997 — May 1999 (1 year 9 months)

  Wrote an Ethernet card simulator as part of a project to investigate offloading part of the TCP/IP stack onto a smart network card.

• High School Intern

  NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

  (Government Agency; 10,001 or more employees; Research industry)

  May 1995 — August 1997 (2 years 4 months)

  Worked in the high-performance computing department, primarily on the Beowulf project. Implemented a user-level distributed shared memory system for Beowulf architectures, presented at the 1998 IEEE aerospace conference. Also coded for a variety of parallel architectures, including the MasPar MP-2 and the (experimental, never released) Convex Exemplar SPP-1000.

Jason Crawford’s Education

• Carnegie Mellon University

  BS, Computer Science, 1997 — 2001

  GPA 3.8, graduated with university honors.
  SAT 1590 (780M/800V, in 1997, after recentering).
  Phi Beta Kappa, inducted Spring 2001.
  
  Stanley and Julia Skalka Scholarship for excellence in entrepreneurship 2000-2001. CMU Senior Leadership award 2001.
  
  Teaching assistant for 15-251 (previously 15-299), 15-213, 15-212, and 15-413.

  Activities and Societies:

  Objectivist Club, Concert Chorus, Repertory Chorus, Jazz Vocal Ensemble, Scotch 'n' Soda, Fringe

Additional Information

Jason Crawford’s Groups:

Ayn Rand Institute

•    Amazon Alumni
•    iPhone Developers - www.iPhoneintouch.com
•    DE Shaw

Jason Crawford’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch