Craig Jones

I’m fascinated by agentic identity, security, and implementation! I’d love to talk about it!

Role
Founder at Pelican Dynamics, Llc
Location
Lake Charles, LA, US
LinkedIn followers
500 followers
General Business & ManagementView LinkedIn profile

About Craig Jones

Senior Staff Software Engineer building platforms where security and distributed systems meet—especially identity, authorization, and infrastructure access for humans, workloads, and AI agents. Primary stack: Go, AWS, Kubernetes, Postgres, and event-driven systems.At StrongDM I’ve led multiple “next‑generation” architecture efforts across authorization/entitlements, scaleable discovery & ingestion, authentication/workload identity, and secrets management—operating at staff+ scope across multiple teams from design spikes through production rollouts. Recent highlights include:• Agentic Security (non‑human identity): advancing short‑lived, verifiable workload identity (SPIFFE/SVID-style patterns) and sidecar/proxy adoption paths that make it practical to secure automation and emerging agentic/AI workflows.• Policy-based authorization: redesigned centralized, DB‑coupled authz into distributed, gateway-first decisioning with contextual controls (device trust posture, step‑up MFA, IP/time/geofence constraints); built an in-memory authorization engine that cut latency from ~2.4s to <15ms and supported req/s.• Cloud discovery at enterprise scale: replaced monolithic push scans with pull-based, resumable execution (state cursors) and a flexible entity/component ingestion model for heterogeneous cloud + Kubernetes resources.My engineering “signature” is decoupling: breaking brittle, tightly-coupled systems into resilient primitives with clear contracts—using standards (OAuth2/OIDC, mTLS/PKI, policy-as-code) and pragmatic consistency tradeoffs to ship safely at scale.I’m also a hands-on org multiplier: technical product ownership, design reviews, mentorship/onboarding, and interviewing/hiring calibration.If you’re building secure platforms for modern infrastructure and AI-driven organizations—especially around identity, authorization, and reliable distributed systems—I’d love to connect.

Experience

  1. Founder

    Pelican Dynamics, Llc

    Feb 2025 — Present · Lake Charles, LA, US

    Dragging duck hunters into the modern era kicking and screaming

Education

  • Rice Business

    Master of Business Administration - MBA

  • Louisiana State University

    Bachelor of Science - BS, Physics

  • Louisiana State University

    Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science

    2012 — 2017

  • Louisiana State University

    Bachelor’s Degree, Physics

    2012 — 2015

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Craig Jones — Founder at Pelican Dynamics, Llc in Lake Charles, LA, US | Unifers