As Director Of Engineering for Microsoft Research, Gavin Jancke built and currently runs the Advanced Development Group and Web Experience Teams within the organization. He also provides leadership from the engineering and employee management perspective for the engineers in MSR Redmond, and participates in senior leadership activities with the General Managers and Vice Presidents of the lab.

The Advanced Development team develops 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. The Web Experience Team is rebuilding a new world class production website for http://research.microsoft.com and associated publication tools, designs, engineers and runs the world-wide organization's line of business solutions, in addition to providing web design & engineering expertise to the world-wide research teams in getting their projects and ideas deployed to the web in a consumable and web scalable form.

In his spare time he still engineers code and of late has been developing a new color barcode format that has a high density storage capability.

Prior to his latest position he worked for Bill Gates' technical advisory staff working on a variety of research projects if the fields of Search and Telephony which have eventually become integrated into products such as MSN Desktop Search. Before this Jancke was a research 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.

Prior to Microsoft Research, Jancke was Development Lead in Microsoft's SQL Server product for 8 years, spanning several versions of the product from V4.2 through V7.0. Here he lead the engineering for the graphical administration and query tools for the product line.