Joe Hacobian has held engineering positions at Nasa’s JPL as a Systems Software Engineer, Shell New Energies (EV division) as a Senior Devops engineer, Cigna/Evernorth as a Senior Software Engineer, and Dept of Homeland Security (contractor) as a Senior Software Engineer. His engineering converged roles in organizations like NASA’s JPL and Digital Domain have honed and tested his ability to approach complex systems with an innovative, tactically-sharpened systems-level perspective aimed at delivering impactful solutions.

Joe was born in Tehran, Iran in 1981 and lived there 3 years in the midst of the Iran/Iraq war before moving with his family to the east coast of the United States. He came of age in Maryland, in the leafy suburbs of
Washington D.C. and studied mathematics, computer programming, and photography (chemical-process era photography) at Montgomery College. His interests at the time revolved around computer generated image processing, synthesis(3D computer generated imagery), and the programmatic analysis of imagery along human rules of image composition and semantics.

When he completed his studies at Montgomery college, he moved to California to pursue a career in the visual effects (VFX) industry. After several years working in advertising and making inroads into the creative side of the industry, Joe decided to switch career tracks and focus on web technologies, computer programming and began an IT career in 2014. In 2016 he started to work as an engineer for Digital Domain Technologies (a startup arm of Digital Domain Inc (the visual effects company that pioneered the effects behind Titanic and
other motion pictures)), it was there that he learned about 360 camera technology and decided to run an experiment to see if this technology could bring “representational equity” to under-represented portions of the world, namely Armenia on Google Maps.

This project was called Armenia360 (https://Armenia360.org) and got the attention of the Google StreetView team. In 2018 this effort was expanded to use Google’s StreetView specification cameras which expanded StreetView imagery from 10,000 to 727,000.

His diverse experiences have equipped him with a unique systems-level perspective and a passion for innovative solutions. He is excited about the opportunity to bring his experience, unique-perspective, and strategic eye, to bear on the challenges we face as an organization and distributed nation.