COMPOSITION
NAMETravis Popkave
SUBJECTRésumé
NO. 1QUAD RULED

Travis Popkave

Principal engineering manager with 16+ years building software — from Windows shell internals to on-device and cloud AI. Designed, built, and shipped features touched by hundreds of millions of people.

Experience

Microsoft

2010 — 2026

Principal Engineering Manager

  • Windows AI. Lead engineering for Windows features powered by on-device and cloud AI — from research prototype through evaluation, shipping, and iteration.
  • Windows Recall. Helped build the feature that lets Windows remember, index, and semantically search everything a user has done on their PC.
  • Windows Theme & Coherence. Applied deep Windows shell knowledge to bring legacy surfaces — dialogs, context menus, and more — into a single modern visual language.
  • Surface Hub OS. Wrote, and then rewrote, a custom Windows shell purpose-built for 55–85" multi-touch collaboration devices.

Senior Engineer

  • Phone + Windows Lock Screen. Unified the Windows Mobile and Windows desktop lock screens and rearchitected the stack so it could surface richer context without weakening the security boundary.
  • Windows 8 / 8.1 Animations & Theme. Designed and implemented the animated Start screen backgrounds in Windows 8.1. Retrofitted a legacy GDI UI framework onto modern graphics primitives to unlock the visuals.

Intern — 2009 · Windows Media Foundation

  • Contributed to the APIs that underpin every media encode and decode path on Windows.

Intern — 2007 · SQL Services

  • Helped build an early precursor to Power BI: an Excel plugin over SQL Analysis Services.

Apple

2008 — 2009

Software Engineering Intern · Apple Remote Desktop

  • Worked on classroom-management scenarios for large, centrally-managed Mac deployments.

Xority

Co-Founder
  • Co-founded a small-town IT company out of high school. Grew it to the point of renting its own office — a formative lesson in shipping, customers, and scope.

Education

  • Rochester Institute of Technology
    B.S. Computer Science · 2006–2010
  • University of Hawaiʻi
    Art coursework · 2010

Memberships

  • Computer Science House
    RIT's live-in technology special-interest house

Selected Early Projects

  • Good Touch (2007). Led a student team that designed and built a large-format multi-touch display — before multi-touch was a thing you could buy.
  • The Brain Power (2005). A timed trivia-competition site that ranked players by speed and accuracy. Peaked at 15–20 active users, which felt enormous at the time.
  • VTAP (2005). A Flash + PHP configurator for a military contractor: customers composed large tent-city layouts from modular pieces and emailed the spec in for a quote.