Jack Backes is the Principal Strategist for Provident Data Centers, where he is a leader in strategic partnerships, industry outreach, and power solutions. His career combines expertise in real estate, data center infrastructure, and software engineering. At LinkedIn, Jack led software engineering teams focused on enhancing data center infrastructure, including creating a rack diversity algorithm to optimize resilience and scale across LinkedIn's global data centers. He also co-led the development of the Argos network monitoring system and built tooling for hybrid cloud migration. After leaving LinkedIn he was founding engineer for Tensorlake's LLM orchestration product “Indexify,” utilizing distributed system design inspired by Google’s Borg and Hashicorp’s Nomad, including the Raft consensus algorithm for high availability. Jack began his career in real estate at Provident Realty Advisors before founding DXZ Media, an app and web development firm. Named a Dallas Business Journal 40 Under 40 honoree, Jack led the RealTech event series, connecting Dallas’s real estate and tech communities. This experience led him to see the future data center demand driven by AI, prompting him to gain hands-on experience in data centers. Now after 12 years away, Jack has returned to Provident with extensive experience in software engineering and data center operations. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is advancing his expertise at SMU in Datacenter Systems Engineering. Jack shares insights on the industry through his Substack newsletter, "The Critical Current."