My whole goal is to make everything easier for everyone,” Jake Summerill happily declares in his sunlit suburban home in Denver, Colorado.
It’s a big task. It’s not easy. But that’s the point.
Jake is the Digital Solutions Lead at Cyberhawk. His role is as exacting as it is expansive. When you walk into Jake’s office, you immediately see that this is not your ordinary engineering job. He’s working off of three computer monitors and two CPUs at any one time. One monitor is purely assigned to coding, while he settles in to work on GeoVisualization (and many, many other things, too!) on the other two. If that’s not enough, he works on seven (yes, seven) UK-based computers that are available during the US shift.
“Since everyone in the UK has logged off, and since I often need more than two computers, I jump on remotely to our UK computers and can run things there, too. It’s ideal for my purposes.”
He started at Cyberhawk as a GeoVisualization expert, where he worked mostly with 2D and 3D model processing. Of course, when you’re at a company like Cyberhawk, you’re encouraged to expand beyond your role. GeoVisualization, Geospatial data and information, operations (including a stint in equipment management for one of the largest inspection campaigns in the world), have been some of Jake’s duties at Cyberhawk. Oh, and he’s an electrical engineer by training, too.
As they say in Scotland, “He’s quite brainy.”
What’s striking about Jake is that he really digs into the big problems, and he does so with an infectious amount of energy. Everything Jake does has a dash of fun to it. From a young age, Jake has worked outside of his comfort zone. From rebuilding cars from the shell up, to creating and competing with robots at major conventions, to teaching himself how to design and build computers, to learning how to code (starting with Windows XP). Jake’s expertise is broad, but can be explained in one simple question: “What’s the big problem?” Once he understands the big problem at play, harkening back to the First Principles in physics, Jake is in go-mode. He’s no stranger to hard and consistent work. If 90 minutes at the end of a day saves 16 hours in the future, he’ll stay on late. He’s always looking around the corner ahead for what’s next, what’s possible.
“I think in terms of two questions: How can I make things more sustainable and how can I make things more scalable? I want to build the system that makes it unnecessary to clone some of our mission critical project managers.”
iHawk, Cyberhawk’s asset visualization software, plays a pivotal role in Jake’s area of expertise, and it’s a software platform that he’s in every day as he designs and adjusts massive 3D images.
“Anyone can create a map. Anyone can create a decent model. The bigger question is what’s next? How can we deliver to a client in the best way so that they can make better decisions? That’s where iHawk comes in and bridges that gap.”
We are excited about Jake's future at Cyberhawk and can't wait to see what he cooks up next!
Wanna sink your claws inTO a little more?
Learn more about our world-beating software iHawk here.
