Congratulations to Pierce Edmiston and Hugh Sato, our latest recipients of 8th Light’s Beacon Award!
Our Beacon Award recognizes team members who exemplify 8th Light's values and inspire us all.
Pierce and Hugh represent two different strengths within 8th Light that come together to create meaningful, high-impact work for our clients.
Pierce, Sr. Principal Engineer blends scientific rigor with technical and product leadership to turn complex research and modeling into stable, production-ready systems. While Hugh, Principal Designer, elevates that work through a human-centered design lens that makes intricate workflows clear, usable, and trustworthy. He brings coherence where systems feel chaotic and reduces cognitive load, helping teams and customers move with confidence.
Both leaders build products from the system out to the experience, ensuring the core is solid and the experience makes the system clear, adoptable, and effective. They design for adherence, flow, safety and change. They prioritize what matters for the business and what will sustain value over time. They translate complexity into outcomes. They build systems people can use, learn from, and rely on.
This partnership became a turning point for one of the world’s most valuable enterprises, where Hugh and Pierce were brought in to strengthen a critical experimentation platform at the heart of the client’s product decisions.
When the work began, that platform was fragmented and difficult to operate. Experiment owners with great ideas had to rely on scattered tooling and manual engineering support just to get started.
Pierce and Hugh anchored a full turnaround. They joined forces to unify the platform’s design, workflow, and technical foundations, ultimately transforming a cumbersome three-week deployment process into a same-day experimentation engine and charting a path toward a groundbreaking fifteen-minute SLA. This shift did more than speed up launches, it elevated experimentation into a strategic, trusted capability that now shapes the client’s strategic roadmap.
One of the most defining aspects of their contribution was how they exemplified our value of Honesty Builds Trust. Our CEO, Jenny Farver, described their impact best:
They didn’t just stabilize a platform. They elevated it into a strategic asset through honesty, clarity, and trust.
Hugh is a force for design excellence. He thrives in deeply technical environments and still brings clarity, usability, and human impact to the center of the work.
Pierce is a technical leader whose rigor and curiosity fuel real progress, shaping systems, teams, and outcomes in lasting ways.
