About

James Crooks is a Staff Software Engineer at Google with over 7 years of relevant experience. He is a skilled infrastructure engineer who focuses on building large scale reliable systems with sustainable fleet costs. James is currently the Tech Lead for Spanner SRE Resource Management, where he has built the team from 4 SREs to a joint SRE and Dev team with 9 SREs and 7 Devs. He has led efforts to simplify Spanner provisioning, landed projects delivering millions of dollars in efficiency improvements while improving user experience provisioning an extraordinarily complex system, and designed a new resource paradigm for Spanner expected to yield hundreds of millions of dollars in savings and improved system reliability with only dozens of lines of code changes. James is also an experienced incident responder, capable of handling large service outage scenarios, running an incidence response team, and frequent post-mortem author often charged with explaining outages to senior leadership. He focuses on systemic improvements in both his service and his team using all tools available whether they be code, architecture, policy, or even simply reframing problems, with the goal of balancing service cost, reliability, engineering time and payoff timelines. Prior to his current role, James was a Senior Software Engineer, Site Reliability at Google where he worked on the Tupperware Scheduler, the central scheduling system for all jobs and containers run at Facebook. He has also worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Meta, where he was a senior engineer on the Tupperware scheduling team, efficiently running Facebook's planet-scale computer. James is an experienced scientist with a PhD and published research at the intersection of health, fundamental biology, and machine learning. He holds a PhD in Biophysical Sciences (Computational Biology) from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Florida. James' tech stack includes Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineer, SRE, Research Scientist, ML, infra, and Search.