Co-Engineering the Future: Meet Ja’Lon Sisson

Authored by Emily Arcuri, Client Computing Group Communications:

Meet Ja’Lon Sisson (He/Him). Dad to Noah, GEM Fellowship Recipient, OS Development Engineer in the CCG-CPE organization, currently co-engineering the future to ensure Microsoft features run best on Intel.

Ja’Lon grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, and he vividly remembers telling everyone, "I would be an engineer one day!” He adds, “I always wanted to be an electrical engineer. I was always taking things apart and putting them back together. It may have been all the Intel TV commercials with the iconic Intel bong that first planted that seed.” 

Ja’Lon went on to do just that! He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University while completing internships at NASA, the National Science Foundation, and at the Remote Sensing Lab. And earned his M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Duke University on a GEM Fellowship scholarship. As part of that scholarship, he was paired with a corporate sponsor, Intel. And, that’s how the Intel chapter of his career began. 

For the last eight years, Ja’Lon has held several internships and full-time roles that led him to his current position – working in Folsom, and Oregon on server and memory products, to testing and validating products in Intel’s Validation Engineering (iVE) team. 

Today, Ja’Lon is based at the Intel Ridgepointe, Washington office. Ja’Lon and his team are part of the Microsoft co-engineering effort. In this team, Intel and Microsoft engineers team up to ensure Microsoft software features run best on Intel’s hardware.

 He says, “I feel like I’m at the forefront of innovation, and I know what’s coming up next.” He adds, “it feels like I’m being let in on a secret, and we can see where things are going to turn. I get to play with Microsoft code developing features coming in 2025, and 2026.”

Ja’Lon is part of the wider CCG Black Leadership Council (CCG BLC) Community – the CCG BLC Connect. He says as part of Black History Month, growing up, Ja'Lon and his four siblings would perform in and attend local tap and jazz shows celebrating Black and African culture. This year, Ja’Lon is attending a Buffalo Soldier Exhibit at the Armory building in Seattle, Washington.  

He says, “On the Intel side, there are a few NIA/IBLC virtual events that I plan on tuning in to. There's one about cooking Louisiana Cajun dirty rice, so I'm interested to see the recipe and possibly learn about the backstory to its creation.”

Outside of work, Ja’Lon is a dad to two-year-old Noah. Ja’Lon enjoys hiking, going to parks, and visiting museums in the Bellevue area with Noah. This year, Ja’Lon plans to travel to make up for time lost during the pandemic, with a trip to South Africa first on the docket. In 2019, before Covid changed the world, Ja’Lon visited five countries and plans to resume sightseeing. In his free time, he enjoys boxing, salsa dancing, and playing video games. If he wasn't busy enough, Ja'Lon is also learning how to play the guitar and speak Spanish.