Meet the team

David Hawkes

Co-founder & CEO

Twenty years designing, automating and troubleshooting large networks, alongside the software career that grew out of needing better tools than the ones he was handed.

At PayPal he was a backbone network engineer on the MPLS and BGP infrastructure behind a global payments network — configuring Internet carriers across Asia and Europe, building private interconnects with AWS, and designing the routing policy that cut partner API latency by more than half. Before that came seven years at FIS: six as an MPLS engineer on a carrier-grade network serving thousands of customers worldwide, then a year building the automation for it.

At Dynecon he was the senior engineer on a network DevOps team automating discovery and configuration across a carrier-grade MPLS estate of more than twenty thousand devices. At VAE he worked on network discovery and analysis tooling, including a retrieval-backed language-model service over internal data and Ansible integrations shipped into customer environments. Earlier roles took him through the City of Phoenix aviation network, pre-sales architecture, and contract engineering across the valley. He is studying physics at Arizona State University.

That career was mostly spent turning systems nobody could fully explain into systems that could account for themselves. Awakened Labs is that same problem, pointed at agents. He has worked with agentic coding tools daily for the past year — long enough to know which of their habits should never be let near production unattended.

David Hawkes on LinkedIn

Jeremy Windsor

Co-founder & COO

Twenty years in carrier and enterprise networks, starting in central offices with his hands on the glass and ending up responsible for one that spans the planet — where the cost of a system that cannot say what it did is measured in outages rather than opinions.

At FIS he architected, engineered and operates a global MPLS network reaching six continents and 130 countries: a backbone carrying VPLS and L2/L3 VPN connectivity, remote access for more than fifty-five thousand employees, and next-generation firewalls across every Tier 1 data centre in the estate. He has been technical lead on more than twenty-five core design projects and some three hundred completed maintenance windows, which is a precise way of saying he has spent a great deal of his life doing irreversible things to production at two in the morning.

Before FIS he was a switch specialist at Cox Communications, designing and deploying service-provider L2 and L3 networks — BGP, MPLS, OSPF, IS-IS — and writing the C# tooling that made those deployments repeatable rather than heroic. Before that, fibre optic technician at TelePacific and switch technician at Cingular Wireless, back when the job meant turning up OC192 circuits and keeping the DC power of four central offices alive. He is CCNP certified.

He has also been running agent harnesses in earnest since the first of them shipped — setting them up, handing them real work, and finding the edges. A good deal of what Ennius refuses to do traces back to something that went wrong on his machine first.

Jeremy Windsor on LinkedIn