Colin Creitz ( ccreitz@gmail.com , LinkedIn: colin-creitz , +1-669-667-9616)
Architect, programmer, game designer, technical diplomat, and leader, with a broad range of development and support skills, and a track record of quick learning, both at startups and large companies. I've led flagship platform and partnerships efforts, played a key role in building successful businesses, and I'm as happy talking to partners as I am writing code. I’ve worked on everything from embedded computers to federated web-scale systems, with a concentration on APIs, and am at my best as a wide-ranging generalist who can break silos and build collaboration.
Engineer, Games Partnerships
Facebook/Meta
2012 - 2023
As a member of the Games Partnerships team, my primary responsibility was working with developers to help them succeed using Facebook's platform products. I worked on the full lifecycle of those products, from initial research and prototyping, all the way through driving adoption.
In this position, I took a key role in designing and building high-profile projects like:
…and many others. Several of these matured into successful 8- and 9-figure businesses. On these and other projects, I recruited and qualified beta developers, onboarded them, and helped turn their feedback into product improvements, then pivoted to increasing adoption. In support of our Web games products, including Canvas and Instant Games, I became a browser JavaScript performance expert, and was able to help partners reduce time to first click by more than 50%, driving D1 retention gains of more than 100%. I did this primarily by helping those partners rewrite their JS initialization logic, identifying places where both network traffic and computation could be parallelized, and building instrumentation to find bottlenecks not just in CPU performance, but also in the user acquisition flows and tutorials.
Due to my passion for teaching, I also helped guide our developer outreach both at-scale and live – at trade shows and developer events. For scaled outreach, I wrote sample code, developer blog posts, documentation, and more. At major shows, such as GDC, E3, and PAX, I worked with Marketing to write the demo scripts and sample code for many of our products, trained contractors to present the material, and was accountable for following up on our gathered leads.
When my team added Quest VR developer support to our portfolio, I focused on Horizon Worlds developer experience, supporting our second-party Worlds builders on matters of performance and ergonomics, while turning developer feedback (and the bugs I discovered) into tasks for the Worlds team. In support of these goals, I learned the TypeScript flavor that Horizon Worlds exposes to creators, but also dipped into the C# host code to add new functionality to the creator experience.
As a senior IC, I contributed very broadly to my team’s success, and the success of the teams around us, as well. I interviewed hundreds of candidates, onboarded dozens of new teammates, organized hackathons and game jams both for my colleagues and for external participants, and provided a veteran perspective when it was needed. At those game jams, I learned, and made extensive use of, game engines such as Unity and Phaser. When Facebook acquired a small streaming media company, I onboarded their engineering and technical talent, and helped build them into our own streamer support team. When we began work on Workplace by Facebook, I helped the newborn Workplace team write their first Active Directory bridge in Hack/PHP, taking advantage of what I’d learned building AD scrapers for the Stratify ETL pipeline (see below). When integrations like the game consoles stretched the limits of what Facebook Login was designed for, I added new functionality as needed, in both the API and UI layers. My technical leadership both permitted and obligated me to work on whatever would lead to platform and partner success.
Senior Engineer
Hexify
2010 - 2012
Developed backend and frontend code for social network games, coding and configuring the whole LAMP stack. The backends were all written in PHP, with both SQL and NoSQL persistence systems, and ran on Apache. Everything was hosted on AWS, using EC2 with highly elastic deployment strategies. The frontends mixed JavaScript and Flash/ActionScript. I also designed game mechanics and themes, and worked across disciplines with artists and other programmers.
One of my signature achievements was to compact the games and focus on backend performance, mostly by rewriting the persistence layer, so we were able to host more players, on more separate games, using fewer server resources. This allowed us to continue support for a few early games that had small, but involved, player bases (aiding in customer retention), and also saved us around 50% of the cost of running our most popular games.
I continued my federated identity work by writing our master OAuth 2 relying party infrastructure, capable of consuming identity assertions from any of the many identity providers we worked with, and of synonymizing users across provided identities where allowed.
Engineer
Stratify, Inc / Iron Mountain DigitalStratify, Inc / Iron Mountain Digital
2003 - 2010
Held a variety of technical positions over the course of a long employment at Stratify, and after its acquisition by Iron Mountain, as it grew from startup to the S&P 500. I was primarily responsible for rapid development and customization of a complex, terascale, e-discovery software system based on machine learning. As an experienced system programmer, I led development of a hugely capable modular Extract-Transform-Load component written in Perl, able to extract text content from hundreds of different source types, both structured and unstructured. Along the way, I built a Single Sign-On functionality for our product, learned Active Directory and LDAP more generally, and built extraction components for LDAP data. I also led the build-out of our Professional Services team, which became a major stream of revenue by allowing us to support customers with very particular needs that our competitors could not meet. I personally made several large (7-figure) sales of services, in the process of building a Sales Engineering workstream for the Professional Services team.
Additional responsibilities included project management, user training, sales engineering, internal technical training, and data center buildout. As a charter employee of a startup that made it to liquidity, I was exposed to many aspects of making a company and a team run successfully.
Data Quality Assurance Analyst
WhizBang! Labs
2001 - 2002
Responsible for building and maintaining statistical models of data quality control in a pioneering web-scale machine learning startup. Worked with a team of part-time human data labelers, client-facing project managers, and internal developers to improve the quality of the labeled training data, improve the quality of delivered data, and build test sets to order. I programmed primarily in Java and SQL to build the relevant tooling.
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant/Researcher
University of Pittsburgh
1998 - 2001
As an undergraduate TA, I taught labs for several CS courses. Beyond that, I worked as a scientist on an AI-in-education research team, wrote a paper that still gets cited 25 years after its publication, and used Lisp to build an early, primitive system for parallelizing machine learning tasks. I also provided ML assistance to a few research groups in other disciplines, such as public health and art history, and gained expertise in system programming as I automated administration across my team’s Sun workstation fleet, and built ETL pipelines for my projects using shell scripting and Perl.