As a Design Studio Program Lead, Jake's responsibilities vary. During the school year, Jake wears the hat of a mentor, advising teams on best practices for communicating with stakeholders, managing risk, and prioritizing tasks. His experience in the startup world lends him well to coaching seed-stage startups going through the Design Studio program. During the summer, Jake creates and cultivates industry relationships and connects prospective project sponsors to opportunities within the program.

Following his time in undergrad, Jake joined Box as a software engineer on the Partner Integrations team where he collaborated with enterprise partner engineering teams to seamlessly integrate the Box experience into third-party platforms. Then, he transitioned to the startup world and led the engineering efforts at Feathery, a Silicon Valley startup. There, he grew the engineering team, forged relationships with new customers, and propelled Feathery from a young MVP-stage product to a mature no-code platform. During his professional career, he has lived in San Francisco, Kansas City, and Lincoln.

Jake earned his Bachelors of Science in Software Engineering and a minor in Mathematics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in May 2020. He is an alum of the Raikes School as a member of Cohort 2016.

In his free time, Jake sings, hikes, reads, and codes. He has an ongoing initiative to hike 1000 miles across all 50 states and codes on passion projects like a cookbook, slide deck editor, and N-dimensional chess.