Cristian-Gheorghe Cretan

Work Experience

Software Engineer, CrowdStrike — BucharestMarch 2024 – Present

Backend systems handling millions of requests per second. Core focus: performance optimization, concurrency, and scalable service design across multiple production systems processing large-scale data.

Improved latency by 80% in a production service by reworking the concurrency model and optimizing execution paths under sustained load.
Led performance investigations on high-RPS services (2–3M req/s); implemented a Redis-based caching layer to reduce datastore pressure and cut redundant read traffic.
Saved $230K/year in infrastructure costs by optimizing a service's resource usage through dynamic scaling and performance improvements in critical paths.

Threat Researcher, CrowdStrike — BucharestSeptember 2022 – March 2024

Led the initiation and development of a Go service that automates ingestion and analysis of file hashes, producing probabilistic true/false-positive assessments.
Developed malware in C++, C, and Python for adversarial emulation.

Threat Analyst Intern, CrowdStrike — BucharestJuly – September 2022

Built a Python parser for Invoke-Obfuscation, streamlining the analysis process.
Tested each Invoke-Obfuscation variation against Falcon to ensure robust detection.

Software Engineer Intern, Keysight Technologies — BucharestJune – September 2021

Designed and built a client-server PoC in C, improving network efficiency.
Used the H2O library to harness HTTP/3 speed and reliability benefits.

Undergraduate Teaching Assistant, Politehnica University of Bucharest2019 – 2023

Created study materials, taught lab classes, helped with grading and homework verification.
Courses: Introduction to Operating Systems, Computer Architecture and Assembly Language.

Projects

GPU Parallel Hash Table (CUDA)

GPU-accelerated hash table for efficient key-value mapping; advanced hashing algorithms and dynamic resizing tuned for VRAM utilization and performance.
Performance analysis documenting implementation and results on large datasets.

Chess Bot (Python)

Three-person Python chess AI using Monte Carlo Tree Search; outperforms Stockfish level 6.

MQTT TCP & UDP Application (C++)

Lightweight MQTT pub/sub implementation for transferring messages between devices; suited to low-bandwidth or resource-constrained environments.

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering2018 – 2022

Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science, Politehnica University of Bucharest. GPA 3.64 / 4.

Relevant coursework: Parallel and Distributed Algorithms, Local Networks, Operating Systems, Numerical Methods, Data Structures, Assembly Language, Object-Oriented Programming, Algorithms Design, Programming Paradigms, Communication Protocols.