Jake is a Principal UX Designer at Optum with experience in UX design and research, front-end development, and product strategy using a user-centered approach. Currently in health tech, he has spent his career in a wide variety of fields helping teams turn complex, ambiguous problems into clear, usable digital systems.

Jake lives with his family in the Raleigh-Durham area of beautiful North Carolina, where he has been active in the local UX community since he arrived from the Midwest in 2009. He has attended IAC since 2016, and started the UX Y’all conference to help bring that experience to more people.

In his free time Jake enjoys a wide variety of nerdy things, including board games, video games, transformers, legos, travelling to Japan, and sci-fi/fantasy in general, especially Star Trek.

As of March 2026, he’s somehow the only Jacob in the IAC website database out of 934 entries.