I'm Nate Craddock. I build engineering teams and weird creative projects, sometimes at the same time.

The Professional Side

I've spent 15+ years in engineering leadership — building teams, architecting systems, and figuring out how to ship things that actually matter. Right now I lead engineering at a PropTech startup in Austin, where I built the team from zero and helped grow the company from $40K to $3M ARR. Before that, I spent a decade at Princess Cruise Lines building the guest experience platform that ran across their entire fleet — 17 ships, 300,000+ active users, nine languages. That work won some awards and contributed $8M in revenue, but more importantly, it taught me how to build and lead distributed teams that ship real products under real constraints.

I've also done stints at Whole Foods (solution architecture during the Amazon integration), a health supplement e-commerce company, a telehealth startup, and Pantheon. The through-line across all of it: complex integrations, teams that need to scale, and products where the technology has to disappear so the experience can shine.

These days I'm deep into AI-augmented development workflows. Not the hype — the actual practice of using tools like Claude and Copilot to multiply what a small team can deliver. I've seen 3x productivity gains across my team by treating AI as a thinking partner rather than a code generator. I write about this stuff here because I think the industry is still figuring out what AI actually means for engineering leadership, and most of the takes I see are either too optimistic or too cynical.

The Creative Side

Here's the part that doesn't fit on a LinkedIn profile.

I went to NYU for film school. BFA in Film and Television. I spent years learning how to tell stories visually before I ever wrote production code. That background still shapes how I think about products — as experiences that need to land emotionally, not just function correctly.

I build animatronics. Halloween is a serious endeavor at my house, and I've been slowly developing the skills to create show-quality animated figures. This involves 3D printing, electronics, DMX lighting and show control systems, pneumatics, and a lot of trial and error. It's the intersection of engineering and theater, which is exactly where I like to live.

I'm a backyard BBQ obsessive. I cook on an offset smoker and have spent way too many hours thinking about fire management, meat selection, and the craft of turning cheap cuts into something transcendent. There's a meditative quality to tending a fire for 12 hours that I find genuinely restorative.

I collect and tinker with retro computers. Commodore 64s, Intellivisions, old Ataris. Partly nostalgia, partly fascination with what people built under absurd constraints. I'm working on a video series about using modern AI to write software for 40-year-old hardware, because apparently that's how my brain works.

I have a long-term dream involving immersive entertainment, dark rides, and fabricated history. It's a 20-year idea that I chip away at when I can. My wife is an artist with a background in comic book art and theme park illustration, so between us we have most of the skills to actually pull something like this off someday.

The Overlap

The creative stuff isn't separate from the professional stuff. It's the same brain.

Building an animatronic figure requires the same skills as building a software system: you start with the experience you want to create, work backward to the architecture, figure out the constraints, and iterate until it works. Managing a fire on an offset smoker for 12 hours teaches you patience and systems thinking in ways that transfer directly to managing an engineering team through a long project.

The film school background is why I care so much about user experience. The retro computing obsession is why I understand constraints and tradeoffs at a visceral level. The animatronics work is why I can talk to hardware engineers and artists in their own languages.

I'm suspicious of people who only do one thing. The best engineers I've worked with have hobbies that have nothing to do with code. The creative cross-training makes them better at the day job, not worse.

The Basics

I live in the Austin, Texas area with my wife and daughter. I want a Land Cruiser that I can take overlanding. I believe in building real things that work, whether that's a software platform or a Halloween prop. I think leadership is mostly about making decisions and then standing behind the people who execute them.

If you want to talk about engineering leadership, AI workflows, distributed teams, animatronics, BBQ, or any of the other weird intersections in my life, I'm always up for a conversation.

You can find me on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Threads, or just reply to something I've written here.

This site is mostly a blog where I write about engineering leadership, AI, and whatever else I'm thinking about. The articles get shared on social media, but this is home base.