Engineering Leader · Fort Worth, TX
Craig Campbell
Engineering technical leader with 15+ years of experience building high-performing teams, delivering 0→1 products, and embedding AI into engineering operations.
Known for translating complex technical concepts into business outcomes, driving alignment across product, engineering, and executive stakeholders, and developing engineers into future leaders. Hands-on track record with RAG-based AI systems, LLM integration, SOC 2 compliance, and large-scale infrastructure modernization.
Targeting Director of Engineering or Senior Engineering Manager roles at growth-stage or mission-driven companies where AI adoption, team development, and scalable execution are strategic priorities.
Inherited an ownerless codebase and established clear architecture standards, documentation, and team ownership frameworks. Architected a RAG-based AI monitoring system — integrating Firecrawl, PostgreSQL context, and Anthropic LLM analysis — improving incentive-change detection accuracy from 10% to 90% while cutting co-founder research time from 8 hrs/week to 15 minutes. It now monitors 443 programs across 46 states. Built a loan origination system integrating Plaid and KBB, reducing processing time from 6 hours to 30 minutes (~80% reduction) for a 5-person team handling 50+ applications/week. Led SOC 2 Type 2 readiness (25+ policies, 200+ controls) and established responsible AI adoption practices including MCP server integrations and prompt quality standards.
Led an 8-person team (6 engineers + 1 designer), replacing an unstructured Notion-based system with Scrum processes and purpose-built tooling — significantly improving sprint predictability and delivery visibility. Drove a full AWS infrastructure migration, consolidating two platforms into one, saving $2,500/month in hosting costs, eliminating 20 hours/week of dual-platform maintenance, and improving email/SMS failover reliability by over 90%. Achieved SOC 2 Type 2 certification from scratch.
Co-founded a philanthropic giving platform, setting company strategy and owning all technical architecture. Led a team of 3 engineers + 1 designer to ship an MVP that mobilized $2M+ in charitable donations, including Ukraine relief efforts. Established and managed 5 B2B partnerships (including Bain LA and Insight Partners). Modernized a legacy Rails/Slim codebase to Node.js + React, accelerating feature delivery by 30%.
Built a software development practice from scratch, growing a 6-person engineering team across a $1.25M annual budget and 5 concurrent projects. Delivered a unified platform for ECHO Colorado, consolidating 7 fragmented applications serving 10,000+ in-state users — later licensed to Oregon and Idaho, adding 5,000+ users across 3 states. Led delivery of a CDC-funded dental evaluation platform for the Colorado Dept. of Public Health. Grew the practice to a $5M+ contract portfolio (10 major contracts, 40+ engagements). Mentored 3 engineers into internal promotions (2 to Lead, 1 to Manager).
Progressed through senior and lead engineering roles across fintech, enterprise, and high-traffic consumer platforms — building skills in system architecture, team mentorship, CI/CD, agile delivery, and customer-facing requirements development. At Match.com, optimized daily email runs from 24+ hours to ~3 hours and built a custom CMS supporting content in 26 languages for a global platform.
I think about engineering at the level of the business, not just the backlog.
Engineering strategy is business strategy. I work backwards from what the company needs to win — not forward from what's technically interesting. That means making tradeoffs explicit, sequencing investments deliberately, and knowing when the right call is to slow down versus push for velocity.
The org chart is a product decision. How a team is structured shapes what it can build and how fast. I think carefully about team topology — where to centralize, where to give autonomy, how to avoid dependencies that create bottlenecks — and I revisit it as the product evolves.
AI adoption without guardrails is a liability, not a feature. I've shipped production AI systems and built the practices around them — prompt quality standards, MCP server policies, code review guidelines for AI-generated output, and SOC 2 controls that account for AI tooling risk. The teams I build move fast with AI because they've done the unglamorous work of building the guardrails first.
Technical vision has to be legible to the business. I translate between engineering and the rest of the organization — turning ambiguous product goals into architectural decisions, and making technical tradeoffs clear to executives without requiring them to understand the implementation. That's the job.
Process only works if engineers trust it. I've introduced Scrum into teams that had none, and it only landed because I treated it as a communication tool, not a mandate. The goal is always visibility and predictability — for the team, for product, for leadership — without adding overhead that slows people down. When process serves engineers, they defend it. When it doesn't, they route around it.
The best engineering investment is the engineers themselves. Three of the engineers I've managed have been promoted into lead or manager roles. I take that seriously — running 1:1s focused on growth, not status, and creating real opportunities for people to stretch into harder problems. A team that develops its own leaders compounds in ways that hiring alone never can.
Every week, someone on our team was manually tracking EV incentives across government websites, utilities, and state programs. It was time-consuming, error-prone, and didn't scale. So we built a system to replace it.
Read on LinkedIn →What I found has real implications for anyone building AI-powered products: the gap between frustrating and impressive AI experiences isn't model quality. It's architecture. Memory, consistency, and cost are all solvable engineering problems.
Read on LinkedIn →A personal RAG application that indexes Obsidian notes for semantic search and LLM-powered Q&A — built for my own knowledge management workflow.
Let's build something together.
Open to Engineering Manager and Director of Engineering opportunities.