Early in her career, Jennifer Marko moved from Tokyo to San Francisco with just three suitcases and the ambition to make a difference in the interior design field.
Driven by a passion for creating innovative workplace designs that enable people to do their best work, Marko has spent the past three decades leading interior design and strategy teams at top architecture firms and large global companies.
As NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang began ramping up plans to build the new Voyager building in Santa Clara, Marko joined the company in 2018 as leader of global real estate planning and workplace design with the unique opportunity to write her own job description and create a team from the ground up. Her mission was to help turn Huang’s vision into reality.
Since then, Marko has built NVIDIA’s design, planning and space management teams, and together they’ve set out to create a cohesive, timeless and functional workplace design across the company’s global offices, with custom nuances based on each location.
Data about how employees are using a space drives design decisions. With the rise of flexible work, Marko and team are focused on making sure NVIDIA’s spaces reflect new ways of working and facilitate collaboration. Their design guidelines are agile, constantly evolving to meet changing needs — and paralleling the way NVIDIANs approach their work.
“NVIDIA treats its employees with so much respect, and we carry out that guiding principle to provide great workplaces,” she said. “Our goal is to create the canvas for NVIDIANs to do the best work of their lives.”
With an architect father who designed airports and Canadian embassies all over the world, Marko lived in Nepal, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and her home country of Canada before moving to the U.S. She brings a global perspective to her work and is passionate about unifying NVIDIA’s brand experience across its offices worldwide.
Marko is especially proud of the custom-built, 750,000-square-foot Voyager building that supports more than 3,000 employees at the company’s Santa Clara campus. Offices like this are the result of Huang’s vision and many cross-functional teams’ collaboration to bring the building and workspace to life.
“I love what I do and feel that if you always try to do what’s best for the greater good, success will come,” she said. “My proudest moments are the achievements that we’ve accomplished as a team.”
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