Drives the strategy and engineering for the Environment Understanding group consisting of engineering, program management & scientists within the Mixed Reality organization. The Environment Understanding engineering group brings Microsoft’s industry leading computer vision capabilities on devices such as HoloLens to a future of distributed computing in the cloud, enabling building experiences in AR/VR in a consistent way regardless of device capabilities and scale. The group provides technology for head tracking, localization, ground truth, anchoring, mapping, scene and object recognition, surface reconstruction and Azure cloud services such as Azure Spatial Anchors and Azure Object Anchors.Co-founder of the Mixed Reality Copilot team, seeking to define latest approaches in AI Vision Transformer technology and how they can be leveraged for physical world scene understanding capability.

As General Manager Engineering and a Research Manager for Microsoft Research, Gavin Jancke built over 19 years the Central Engineering Group within the organization. The Central Engineering group serves the engineering needs for the Redmond Research Lab, composed of software engineers, program managers, designers, quality assurance, and hardware & electrical engineers, transforming researcher ideas from conception to reality.The 45+ person multi-disciplinary group develops software & hardware technologies and components based on Microsoft Research innovations, from technical transfer to the main Microsoft product groups, large scale prototyping and deployment, to internal lab engineering needs. Since the team was created over 800 engineering projects have been fulfilled. Technology transfers that have been integrated into products spanning from Windows, Office, XBox, Azure, Bing Platform. & others.He recently led the engineering effort behind Project PRISM, an ultra low latency, passthrough augmented reality headset. He is still an active engineer and was responsible for the camera firmware and USB drivers for Project PRISM, firmware engineering and client software for the Parkinson therapy Project Emma Watch. He also conceived the Project Eclipse air quality monitoring device, delivering the electrical and firmware engineering for the device itself.He also managed and led the engineering effort for the Kinect for Windows SDK Beta and accepted the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award in 2011.He has over 10 US patents awarded, half dozen applications still pending and has published papers in various academic conferences in the fields of Human Computer Interaction, Communication, and Storage.

Worked in the Chairman's Office as part of Bill Gates' technical advisory staff working on a variety of research projects in the fields of Search and Telephony which have eventually become integrated into products such as MSN Desktop Search, & Office Communicator.

Research software engineer in Microsoft Research's Collaboration and Multimedia team engineering a variety of projects from peripheral awareness interfaces which became the Windows Vista Sidebar, to collaboration software evolving into Microsoft Roundtable.

Development Manager in Microsoft's SQL Server, spanning several versions of the product from V4.2 through V7.0. Here I lead the engineering for the graphical administration and query tools for the product line such as SQL Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer etc.