#PublicSectorJobBoard

This Week in Public Sector Tech — Aug 28, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:35:34 GMT

📣 Did the board or newsletter play a part in landing an interview or a job? I’d like to hear about it! Share your story here - a few sentences is plenty.

🗓️ 1:1 career navigation conversations. If you’re trying to figure out how to move into civic tech or what your next move looks like once you’re there, reach out via civicworkstudio.com/contact with what you’re trying to figure out and a link to your LinkedIn. I’ll follow up with availability and rates.

📣 Hiring? Share your open roles in tech and innovation! Tech Jobs for Gov is open for roles from across the civic tech field, whether in government, non-profits, startups, academia and more. Posting is free for governments with tiered pricing for other types of orgs. Learn more and post at techjobsforgov.com/post-a-job.

The scale of digital service teams: food for thought

NYC just overtook Silicon Valley as the largest U.S. tech hub by headcount. According to CBRE’s 2026 report, NYC officially as the country’s largest tech workforce (394,300 versus San Francisco’s 375,730). This got me thinking about how these governments are using this talent and workforce. New York City government is in the early stages of maturing how it approaches technology and service delivery at scale, but the gap isn’t necessarily the workforce. PIT Crew, the Service Design Studio and the other local teams are just a few examples of insourcing, but I would estimate that the centralized, dedicated digital and service design workforce across NYC is roughly the same size as that workforce in San Francisco, a city 1/10 of the size.

San Francisco started their centralized digital service team in 2017, following the development of a digital service strategy in early 2016. The team grew from 15 to 50 staff in the first five years, more than tripling in size. NYC had the Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer under DeBlasio, and technically officially started NYC Digital Service in 2021 days before the Adams administration took over, though many would argue that its impact was minimal over the last four years (but there have been leadership changes and team growth under the new administration). If NYC applied the same ratio of dedicated central digital services staff that San Francisco has employed (whether you look at overall city workforce size or the number of residents), a centralized unit would have somewhere between 430 to 515 employees…

News & Reads

🔔 Fall in love with the problem, not the AI, state data leader says — Pennsylvania brought on their first Chief Data and AI Officer earlier this summer, and one thing that stuck with me from her recent interview is her public commitment that “maybe the right answer is not AI”. Priya Narasimhan sat down with GovTech to talk about her new role, and as PA expands the role to include AI, she is committed to understanding the problem and resisting AI-as-default when the solution could be a different technology or just a process change. She highlighted an example of where AI can come in handy - blurry or incorrect documents submitted by residents in their benefit applications. PA is already a national leader in thoughtful digital and technology leadership, so keep an eye out for more to come on the data/AI side.

🤖 As AI agents become government actors, who is accountable for what they do? — While many North American governments aren’t employing AI agents at scale right now, it is important to think about the potential implications. At a GovInsider event earlier this month, the discussion turned to accountability for AI agents, and how to manage permissions, security and accountability, ultimately tracking actions as well as who gave permission in the first place. In the US, we often see accountability outsourced to vendors, or designed in such a way that no individual truly has the ability to make a final decision to move a project forward, or be held accountable for decisions. Before we get to an era when we hold AI agents and identities accountable, we need to be thinking about how to address human accountability for outcomes and actions as well.

🏛️New resources for building digital service teams — U.S. Digital Response recently released a new toolkit on structuring, staffing, and growing a government digital service team, focusing on two models of digital service teams: an Executive Model (fast, lives in a mayor’s/governor’s office, vulnerable to elections) versus an Enterprise Model (slower, embedded, funded through appropriations, built to last). In Virginia, Governor Spanberger proposed $5M for startup costs for Virginia Digital Service, a new digital service team that was the only entirely new initiative in her budget package, naming Jen Pahlka’s work as the model. The budget package was approved by the General Assembly, but no real news yet on when positions will come.

🌀When do lawmakers care about the outcomes of their work? — Jen Pahlka published a new piece looking at the experimental Outcomes Review process in the California Assembly. They recently announced the results of the pilot and some aren’t good. Programs got nullified and lawmakers may never have followed up. This speaks to an important point we don’t talk about enough - the interplay between policy and implementation. There are times where policymakers put programs into law with well-intentioned metrics and goals that ultimately make delivery difficult or don’t make a lot of sense technically, but there are also times when a good program never sees the light of day for one reason or another. We need to continue building in real feedback loops and collaboration between those designing policies and programs, and those implementing them. Outcomes Review processes may be one way to do that.

🇭🇺 Hungary is designing government services to disappear — Digital Hungary Agency’s Zsolt Bányai recently shared that the agency’s “long-term vision for digital public services is for them to be as seamless as using electricity”. Residents shouldn’t have to question how something works, it should just work, much like a light switch. Hungary is quickly growing it’s service design work, with over 1.9 million users on its mobile app that provides access to over 200 government services. They’ve built on three main principles: talk to people who use the service; break two habits: using traditional government terminology and always building something new, and; make quality non-negotiable.

📋 The federal paperwork process that’s quietly wasted $2.2B on child welfare IT — Mark Headd wrote about a key bottleneck and blocker in modernizing legacy systems that receive federal funding - the Advance Planning Document (APD) process. He argues that the APD process means that billions of dollars are going to propping up legacy systems through transitional systems instead of building new ones that are effective and relieve the ongoing pressure. In the case of Comprehensive Child Welfare Information System (CCWIS), they found that 85% of over $2.2B has gone to maintaining the legacy system, rather than fixing the underlying issues with a modern system.

🗣️ Arizona pilots an AI translation tool for 8,000 human services staff — Arizona DES needed to translate materials across 60+ programs into 15 languages for SNAP recipients. Even as enrollment has declined by nearly half due to implementation of the structural changes mandated by the federal government. The Department of Economic Security partnered with U.S. Digital Response for a 14-week project to build a prototype that showed 50%+ faster translation at 90%+ accuracy, leading to an ~80% projected cost reduction. As DES employees fight to keep as many people on SNAP rolls as possible, better information, faster translation and more staff capacity available will be vital.

🔥 Fast but Fair Federal Firing — We the Doers, a group of former federal senior civil servants, convened a group of experts to explore the question ““What would it take to be able to remove true underperformers from federal service within six months while still ensuring due process, adherence to merit system principles, and protecting civil servants from whistleblower retaliation and politically motivated firings?”. Their new report found it took 19-21 months on average, costing between $28k and $53k in supervisor time. Poor performance and conduct has long reaching consequences on teams - increasing workloads, employee burnout and frustration, all impacting a team’s performance and ability to deliver. The question is what can or will be done?

Events

💻 Virtual: Evaluating AI in Practice: A Benchmarking Series for Government — InnovateUS’s five-part live series for state and local program managers on measuring whether AI tools deliver public value. Five Tuesdays, Sep 8–Oct 6, 2pm ET, free.

🦀 Tysons, VA | Wed. Sept 9: Service Delivery & Experience COI Social Hour — Monthly, no-agenda social hour for people across government, industry, academia, and nonprofits on service delivery, CX, and modernization.

🦀 Silver Spring, MD | Sept. 9-10: State of GovTech 2026 — CivStart’s seventh annual govtech summit. Eleven startups pitch across permitting, public safety, grants, and constituent services. Sep 9–10, Silver Spring Civic Building, free for government employees.

💼 National | Sept 14: Paul A. Volcker Government Internship Award — $3,000 stipend for students/recent grads who’ve secured a government internship. Priority to first-gen, non-traditional, and Pell Grant students, and juniors/seniors. Deadline: September 14.

🗽 NYC | Sept. 30: Public Engagement Hackathon — State Capacity Ecosystem Team, CUNY PIT Lab, and Civic Roundtable’s second flagship build event on how NYC collects and acts on public feedback. June’s round produced 20 working tools. September 30, 5:30–11pm, in-person, dinner provided.

💻 Virtual | Oct 7,14, 21: Democratic and Public AI: Buying and Building for Civic Use — Same InnovateUS umbrella as above. Three sessions on how government buys AI now, what “public AI” means, and putting it into practice, with Beth Simone Noveck (The GovLab), Luca Cominassi (OECD), and others.

🗽NYC | Sat., Oct 10: A Civic Tech’ish Happy Hour: Island Edition. Join a cross-section of people working on cities and public systems: public servants, technologists, founders, funders, consultants, and nonprofit operators for an afternoon of networking and conversation. Optional volunteer session with the Billion Oyster Project immediately before.

📜 DC | Oct 16: CAP Services Fest — Center for American Progress’s first Services Fest: Congressional caseworkers, civic technologists, policy experts, and advocates ideating on the future of government service delivery. Registration not yet open.

🍷 DC | Nov 5: DSC Connect — Digital Services Coalition’s new interactive forum for candid government-industry conversation on digital services issues. November 5, District Winery, DC.

🎤 Pitchfest goes national: four new cities, one pitch format | Pilot City is a national non-profit that uses a speed-dating format for civic problem-solving with government employees and academics. They’ve expanded beyond NYC and are hosting events in four other regions across the country: Boston | Oct 14; LA (focused on water) | Oct 20; Philadelphia (focused on transportation) | Oct 29; and, Minneapolis/Hennepin County | Nov 6.

Highlighted Teams & Roles

⛰️ Colorado is continuing to staff up, this time with a focus on responsible AI implementation, even starting with the question: should we? Join OIT as an AI Senior Service Designer ($135k), Senior Delivery Manager (AI) ($135k), Senior Delivery Engineer (AI Infrastructure) ($135k), or a AI Governance and Evaluation Manager (up to $160k).

🛫 Join the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to serve as Senior Data Engineer. This role is the technical backbone of a decision-support system that moves millions through a world‑class airport system. You’ll help maintain and modernize the team’s data infrastructure, have access to a team of contract staff and have an impact on airport operations and customer experience in the region.

🧩 Government can’t modernize how it delivers technology without modernizing how it buys technology. Help Allegheny County do just that as a Procurement Strategist (up to $118k). You’ll help rethink the entire process, moving towards modular procurements, outcome-based contracting and more.

🛣️ How does NYC know which of its bridges, buildings, and roads need repair before something goes wrong? The answer is a system most people have never heard of: AIMS. Join NYC OMB as the Unit Head - Asset Management to help run it and make it work better to help NYC track the condition of its infrastructure. You’ll be hands on in modernizing the underlying database, build applications on top of it, and lead a team of others to do the same.

🏠 Exygy is scaling Bloom Housing, an open-source platform that helps governments and housing partners modernize access to affordable housing. Join the team as Senior Growth Manager (up to $160k), leading growth strategy and execution as the team expands, or as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (up to $140k) to lead the technical work needed to make sure the product continues to be dependable, scalable and secure. In turn you’ll help affordable housing residents residents find and apply for housing, while giving property managers and housing staff a unified way to manage listings, applications, and housing stock all in one place.

Open Roles

There are over 230 jobs listed right now at techjobsforgov.com and there are new ones added every day. The newsletter includes a selection of roles currently open.

UX, Design and Innovation

🍀 Data Quality & Service Design Specialist | MA Department of Workforce Development | up to $104k

🍎 Senior User Researcher | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $160k

🔔 Wayfinding Coordinator - UI/UX Design | Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) | up to $91k (closes Sept 1)

🦀 Civic Designer | Baltimore Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation | up to $89k (closes Aug 31)

⛰️ Senior Service Designer | Colorado Office of Information Technology | up to $145k

🌦️ Web Content Supervisor | City of SeaTac | up to $132k (closes Sept 4)

🌦️ Content Strategist | City of Seattle | up to $135k (closes Sept 3)

Product & Program Management

🍀 Senior IT Program/Portfolio Manager | MA Education Secretariat | up to $199k

🍎 Senior Advisor, Digital Strategy | NYC Mayor’s Office of Child Care and Early Childhood Education | up to $190k

🍎 Product Specialist | NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene | up to $108k

🍎 TPM, Institutional Services | New York Public Library | up to $110k

🦀 Senior Product Manager | National Gallery of Art | up to $187k (closes Sept 8)

🦀 Product Manager | Library of Congress | up to $187k (closes Sept 8)

🐊 Director of Solution Delivery | Texas Health and Human Services | up to $11k/month

⛰️ Senior Product Manager | Colorado Office of Information Technology | up to $145k

🐻 Product Manager: Data & Innovation | City of San Rafael | up to $175k

💻 Lead Product Manager | New Jersey Innovation Authority | $166k

Emerging Tech

🍀 Senior Director, Data & AI Strategy | Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) | up to $203k

🍎 AI Cloud Solutions Architect | NJ Office of Information Technology | up to $135k

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍎 Director of Food Safety Data Analytics | NYC Department of Health | up to $135k

🍎 Senior Data Engineer | PANYNJ, Aviation Strategy | up to $160k (closes Aug 31)

🦀 Data Governance and Analytics Manager | City of Baltimore | up to $182k

🌽 Manager, Master Data Management/AI | Chicago Public Schools | up to $133k

🐻 Data Scientist Supervisor | LA County Department of Mental Health | up to $170k

⛰️ Data Architect | Colorado Office of Information Technology | up to $135k

🌺 Native Hawaiian Data System Administrator | State of Hawai’i | up to $92k

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍀 Application Manager (Digital Workplace) | MBTA | up to $143k (closes Sept 7)

🍎 Senior Software Engineer (GeoSupport) | NYC Dept of City Planning | up to $125k

🍎 Full Stack Developer | NYC Office of Technology and Innovation | up to $120k

🍎 Software Engineer | State of Delaware | up to $98k (closes Sept 3)

🔔 Senior Software Engineer - Mobile (Android) | City of Philadelphia | up to $110k

🐊 Automation Engineer | Texas Health and Human Services | up to $12k/mo

🌦️ Senior Power Platform Developer | OR Department of Justice | up to $12k/month

🐻 Cloud Infrastructure Engineer | City of San Jose | up to $164k

Executive Leadership

🍀 Digital Services & Digital Accessibility Program Lead | MassDOT | up to $195k

🍀 Chief Strategy and Data Officer | Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities | up to $173k

🍎 Executive Director, Product Management | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $200k (closes Oct 4)

🍎 Senior Director of Strategic Operations Projects | NYC Department of Education, Division of Early Childhood Education | up to $176k (closes Sept 2)

🐻 Director of IT Services | City of Chula Vista | up to $22k/month (closes Aug 31)

🐻 Manager, Digital Innovation | Port of Long Beach | up to $222k (closes Aug 31)

Impact beyond the PIT Crew

Rebecca Heywood — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:45:41 GMT

Over 4,000 people1 have applied for the 35 open positions on NYC’s Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew, the new team at New York City Office of Technology & Innovation that will partner with agencies to move from ideas to implementation within months, not years. I am excited about the impact that these 35 people will be able to have on how the city delivers services, but keenly aware that this means that thousands of qualified applicants won’t get one of these jobs.

If you have applied for a PIT Crew and don’t end up with one of those roles, I want to share other ways that you can have an impact on government service delivery in New York City and beyond. New Yorkers need your interest, passion and skill, so consider taking advantage of one of these other pathways. I will walk you through some of the other paths you can take to do work that matters in and around New York City government.

Work for another NYC government agency

PIT Crew isn’t the only team within New York City government focused on improving service delivery and how residents experience government. It’s just the newest, and has had pretty great marketing.

PIT Crew is an example of a centralized team that will be working with teams across agencies, but is unlikely to ultimately own the findings or products they build. There are several other teams like this across the city. There are also agency-level teams who focus on building tools and products within a particular field. Each agency also has an IT department that has the most sustained and direct impact on how agencies work and deliver. All of these types of teams and their work matter.

NYC Digital Service

NYC Digital Service is another team within the NYC Office of Technology & Innovation focused on delivering public-facing digital experiences in partnership with agencies and stakeholders across the city.

NYC Office of Technology and Innovation (NYC OTI)

The parent agency of both the PIT Crews and NYC Digital Service, OTI delivers services to New Yorkers and to their fellow agencies to connect people to City services and increase opportunities. Learn more about their services here.

NYC Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity (aka NYC Opportunity)

NYC Opportunity helps the City use evidence and innovation to reduce poverty and increase equity. Some of the teams that may be of interest include the Service Design Studio and the Digital Products Team.

NYC Campaign Finance Board

CFB is an independent agency that is dedicated to making local democracy more equitable and transparent. They provide access and information for New Yorkers to vote and run for office, and administer NYC’s matching fund program, enhancing the impact of small-dollar donations.
CFB has a growing design, product and project management organization focused on delivering high quality digital tools and products to New Yorkers, candidates and local campaigns.

NYC Planning Tech

The NYC Department of City Planning has been a leader within the city in building easy-to-use tools for staff and the public alike. They have built tools like Applicant Maps, a tool to produce the required maps for applications to the City Planning Commission, ZoLa, New York City’s zoning & land use map, and many more.

Other teams that hire technologists include:

Find NYC government jobs at cityjobs.nyc.gov, or browse current civic tech and government tech openings, including many of the teams and orgs listed here, on Tech Jobs for Gov.

Work for a state or regional digital service or civic tech team

Beyond New York City government, there are many other teams and agencies at other levels of government that you can work for while living in New York City. Just like in the City, there are both centralized teams as well as agencies that hire technologists. Some of the centralized teams include:

New York State Digital Service

The New York State Digital Service is a team of strategists, product managers, and technologists who work with agencies to streamline and improve the digital experience across New York State.

New York State’s Human-Centered Design (HCD) Team

The HCD team at the New York State Office of Information Technology Services runs the NYS Design System and Digital Accessibility work, as well as helping teams across the state build digital services that prioritize user outcomes, meet accessibility standards like WCAG 2.2 AA, and work better for everyone overall.
Learn more from the ITS podcast.

New York State Office of Customer Experience

The CX Office champions a customer-centric culture and is working to transform how New York residents access services and benefits from the state. They created the New York Experience Playbook, and set the CX strategy, working with teams across the state to simplify processes and better use technology to reduce barriers to service and decrease wait times.

MTA Digital Service Team

The MTA Digital Service team works on the (non-ad) screens in the subway, as well as running TrainTime and the MTA App and mta.info. This team of about 20 engineers, PMs and designers work are responsible for all customer-facing digital endpoints. Find MTA jobs at mta.info/careers.

New Jersey Innovation Authority

NJIA uses data-driven, human-centered, and agile processes to identify, understand, and address all kinds of complex challenges. They work collaboratively across the State, across sectors and with the public to design and deploy better public products, services, and policies to New Jersey residents, businesses, and institutions. Find jobs at innovation.nj.gov/join.

Find New York State jobs at statejobs.ny.gov. If you’re open to looking beyond just New York State, consider checking out CODE PA, the Maryland Digital Service, MassDigital, Colorado Office of Information Technology and other digital service teams across the country.

Share with someone who applied to the PIT Crew. Let’s grow the civic tech field together.

Work for a civic tech organization that partners with government agencies

The civic tech ecosystem is growing, and there are many different types of organizations that support the work happening inside New York City and other governments. These include non-profit organizations, for-profit companies, public benefit corporations, universities, philanthropies and more. I’ve shared a non-exhaustive list of some of the organizations I am familiar with that work in and around NYC below.

Non-profits

For-profits

Philanthropy

Robin Hood Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation (provided funding for one PIT Crew)
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Next Ladder Ventures

Academia

What agencies or organizations are missing? Leave a comment to let others know about work happening in and around NYC government.

Work for a GovTech startup or company

There are a variety of startups and tech companies that work closely with government teams to fill gaps and ultimately provide better government services. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I’ve shared some that work remotely and in NYC below.

Propel: building technology that makes people’s government benefits better, at the speed and scale they deserve.
Holly: AI-driven job design, compensation planning, and workforce analysis for local government hiring
Civic Roundtable: a government operations platform purpose-built for local, state, and federal government agencies and their partner organizations
Polimorphic: the complete AI platform for government services
Concourse: building software that fits governments instead of forcing governments to fit the software.

🔎 Didn't find what you're looking for above? Tech Jobs for Gov tracks open roles across agencies, state digital service teams, civic tech orgs, and more in NYC and across the country, updated as new listings come in.

Luke Farrell, Deputy Commissioner & Director, NYC PIT Crew, shared the latest numbers at BetaBagels 016 - A Conversation with OTI’s PIT Crew hosted by BetaNYC last week.

This Week in Public Sector Tech — Aug 14, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:56:26 GMT

📣 Did the board or newsletter play a part in landing an interview or a job? I'd like to hear about it! Share your story here - a few sentences is plenty.

🗓️ 1:1 career navigation conversations. If you’re trying to figure out how to move into civic tech or what your next move looks like once you’re there, reach out via techjobsforgov.com/contact with what you’re trying to figure out and a link to your LinkedIn. I’ll follow up with availability and rates.

NEWS & READS

🗺️ While US governments are definitely making advances, there are a lot of incredible global examples for us to learn from and watch. Some of what caught my attention from around the world this week:

Ukraine continues to be a leader in fast-paced digital government transformation in response to the war. What started as a mobile app for digital driver’s license and car registration, quickly expanded to form the basis for accessing government services digitally. Today, Diia has over 22 million users and allows access to over 140 digital services, critical for a time when Ukrainians continue to be displaced. An independent org has been tracking Ukraine’s GovTech reform progress, and recently announced that Ukraine’s GovTech Reform Index just hit its highest score ever. Hear from Kateryna Frolova, the head of the Global GovTech Center in Kyiv, about her personal transition from private sector tech to government, the work she does in Ukraine and advice for others entering public service.
South Africa launched their Roadmap for the Digital Transformation of Government in May 2025, with the goal to unify fragmented digital services by 2030. They launched the next phase of their visa digitalization scheme at the end of July, and they have expanded access points for Smart ID applications from 214 offices to 541 offices through a partnership with the banking sector.
Malaysia is addressing the Once-Only challenge, the idea that people shouldn’t have to resubmit the same data to different government agencies, through the Malaysian Government Central Data Exchange (MyGDX). GovInsider shared that a major test was verifying national examination results in real time for university applicants, a time when there are typically over one million data verification requests per hour. The platform has over 400 live APIs and a common metadata standard.
Vietnam’s prime minister approved the National Digital Transformation Strategy for 2026-2030 in mid-July as part of the goal to become a developed digital nation. They set a goal for full digitalization of all administrative records and outcomes by 2030, and a 99% public satisfaction with online public services. To kick off, they launched a 100-day action plan to remove digital transformation bottlenecks, running through November 30, 2026, initially including a national digital mapping platform, a National AI Competence Center and more.

Closer to home…

🤖 sat down with from the Horizon Institute for Public Service to talk about her thoughts on where AI actually helps government. The takeaway from the conversation is that she sees the real opportunity in regulatory simplification and vendor dynamics. She rightfully called out that some of the major barriers to fixing government systems are that regulations are incredibly complex and confusing, citing that in one state the DOL regulations for an unemployment system are 7,119 pages. AI can help review those regulations, make sense of them, and point at what is contradictory or confusing. It can also provide government employees with the tools to understand the complexity of a potential change in federal or state regulations, allowing them to look at their own codebase with the help of AI before paying a vendor $50M+ for a change order to meet that regulation. Her final takeaway is that government doesn’t need expensive AI researchers, but rather needs people who understand both the technology and the constraints of the system. There’s a great reading list if you want more.

🏛️ New York Focus found that New York’s AI-use inventory is undercounting use cases…by a lot. Only 13 of roughly 100 state agencies reported AI use that “directly impacts the public”, but programs that have been shared publicly like DMV’s facial recognition, the State Police’s use of Dataminr, and a caseworker-monitoring tool at OCFS are all missing from the AI-use inventory.

🧭 If you’re looking for a job in government, knowing what the hiring timeline might look like is usually nearly impossible and something you’ll likely have to expect. Work for America and Harvard Kennedy School found none of the 12 largest US cities can break hiring down by stage, and pre-posting bureaucracy gets folded into numbers meant to measure recruiting speed. WFA is recruiting cities for a fall cohort to fix it.

🏙️ Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania made a statement in the 2026-27 about his commitment to digital transformation. CODE PA, headed by Sara Hall, and formerly led by PA CIO Bry Pardoe, receives $3.7 million to modernize permitting processes in partnership with the Commonwealth’s Department of Environmental Protection. It also includes $10M for cybersecurity infrastructure, and $7 million to modernize SNAP EBT cards from magnetic stripes to chip-enabled cards.

🏙️ San Francisco issued an Request for Information (RFI) for a citywide integration infrastructure layer connecting city departments’ data and systems. This is a common challenge, and one made worse when every agency defines terms differently. The Searchlight Institute recently published its research on why this is so hard. Two programs can use the same term to mean different things, and the mismatch can have massive implications for things like eligibility determinations. One California county counted 225 homeless children under HUD’s definition of homelessness, and 12,959 under the Department of Education’s.

Events

🍻 San Francisco: Join for a Civic Gathering Happy Hour in San Francisco, a casual meet up for folks in and around civic tech. Aug 18 at 5:30pm PDT. Register here.

🚢 Virtual: Join the Port of Long Beach for a virtual information session about their open Manager, Digital Innovation role. Aug 18 at 5pm PDT. Click here to join the meeting.

🎭 NYC: BetaNYC is hosting a Civic Tech Summer Showcase, where community members will be showing off their latest civic tech projects. Aug 20 at 6pm EDT. Learn more here.

📈 Boston: Join for a hackathon, RAG the City: Ask Boston Anything, on August 22 at 10:45am EDT. The goal is to use Boston’s public datasets and build a RAG system that lets residents ask questions and get real answers, with two tracks: one focused on the architecture and one on the experience. Learn more here.

🍩 Los Angeles: Join Data + Donuts for a discussion from LA County’s Homelessness Prevention Unit on Predicting and Preventing Homelessness in LA County. Aug 26 at 8am PDT. Register here.

🗽NYC, SF and Gainesville, FL: Join for CityCamp, a community unconference where attendees will build the agenda on-site for discussions around policy, programs, tech, tools, data and more. September 19 or 20. Register for NYC, San Francisco and Gainesville, FL.

🤔 Virtual: ITU and UNDP are hosting a free training course on Responsible digital transformation: impact assessments for AI and data governance, building on UNDP’s Human Rights Impact Assessment methodology. Course takes place from Oct 6 - 27, with applications open Aug 11 to Sept 19. Learn more here.

🍻 NYC: Put it in your calendar. Civic Tech’ish is going to Governor’s Island on Oct 10 for an afternoon happy hour and an optional Billion Oyster Project volunteer session. RSVP opens August 18. Subscribe to the Luma to get updated when it opens.

Open Roles

There are hundreds of jobs listed right now at techjobsforgov.com and new ones are added every day. The newsletter includes a selection of roles currently open.

UX, Design, Content and Innovation

🍀 Data Quality & Service Design Specialist | MA Department of Workforce Development | up to $104k
🍎 Senior User Researcher | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $160k (closes Oct 4)
🦀 Human-Centered Design (HCD) Specialist | U.S. Patent and Trademark Office | up to $111k (closes Aug 25; eligibility limited)
🦀 Patents Customer Experience (CX) Specialist | U.S. Patent and Trademark Office | up to $158k (closes Aug 25; eligibility limited)
🌽 Web Content Systems Specialist | Illinois Department of Innovation and Technology | up to $10k/month (closes Aug 20)
⛰️ Senior Service Designer (Remote From Anywhere In Colorado) | Colorado Office of Information Technology | up to $145k
⛰️ Digital Service Expert (Design) | Colorado Office of Information Technology | $130k (closes Aug 23)
🐻 Website Content Designer | CA Department of Healthcare Services | up to $8k/month (closes Aug 24)
🫎 Digital Content Specialist | City & Borough of Juneau | up to $91k (closes Aug 20)

Product & Program Management

Emerging Tech

🍎 AI Project Lead | Kings County District Attorney | up to $140k (closes August 26)
🌲 Deputy Director, Artificial Intelligence | MaineIT | up to $121k (closes August 14)

Data, Analytics and Measurement

Engineering and Cybersecurity

Executive Leadership

Accessibility

🍎 Digital Media Accessibility & Operations Specialist | CT Department of Administrative Services | up to $142k (closes Aug 14)

Know someone interested in civic tech? Forward this their way.

This Week in Public Sector Tech — Aug 3, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 14:46:06 GMT

📣 Hiring? Share your open roles in government or civic tech. Tech Jobs for Gov is a new job board for tech and innovation jobs in government and civic tech, open to all types of organizations. Government jobs are always free to post, with tiered pricing available for postings from other organizations. Post at techjobsforgov.com/post-a-job.

🗓️ Openings for August 1:1 navigation conversations. If you’re trying to figure out how to move into civic tech or what your next move looks like once you’re there, reach out via civicworkstudio.com/contact with what you’re trying to figure out and your LinkedIn. These conversations are confidential. I’ll follow up with availability and rates.

A continued shift away from traditional IT

More and more jurisdictions are sharing publicly that they are rethinking how they are managing technology. Colorado restructured its entire Office of Information Technology around a product delivery model in June, and across the country, CIO seats are being filled by people with deep backgrounds in digital transformation and service delivery. I’ve shared here about Bryanna Pardoe, who went from running CODE PA, the commonwealth’s digital experience office, straight into the state CIO role. Last week in an article in GovTech, Rachel Silver, the new CIO in Allegheny County, PA, shared that she is taking the product operating model she piloted in the Department of Human Services to her new role as the county’s CIO. Even the PIT Crews in NYC are from a CTO with deep experience in digital services. Lisa Gelobter served as the Chief Digital Service Officer at the U.S. Department of Education under Obama.

New Jersey took a somewhat different path. Rather than bringing the digital service expertise into the CTO role itself, it wrote the relationship between the innovation office and IT into law when the state formally established the Innovation Authority. The CTO and the Chief Innovation Officer formally advise each other’s offices, and their roles are built to meet in the middle between core IT infrastructure and resident needs and program outcomes, as Dave Cole shared with Vital City last week.

While the approaches across different jurisdictions vary, they are making the same bet: digital modernization and innovation work isn’t just a nice to have. It is a vital part of how government runs, and we need to rethink the role it plays in how programs and projects are delivered. If you’re seeing these changes in other jurisdictions, please share in the comments.

Reads

🐊 North Carolina just passed the biggest rewrite of its civil service law in 60 years — It is a true bipartisan effort, signed by a Democratic governor after passing a Republican legislature unanimously. Jennifer Pahlka’s writeup is worth the full read. She goes over the details and why it matters. It took a Governor deciding it was an issue, and an HR Director willing to partner and be creative on how to fix it. The challenges North Carolina faces aren’t unique - we see the same issues play out across the country. I hope others take notice.

🍎 How New Jersey got a head start on AI — Vital City’s interview with Dave Cole, the state’s chief innovation officer, goes into depth about what the team does day-to-day. If you’re thinking about joining a state digital service team, this is a must-read to get an idea of the type of work you may be able to do. They now have 80 staff, a homegrown AI assistant with 1.2 million prompts logged, and a deliberate refusal to build public-facing chatbots because, in Cole’s words, that’s not going to fix a bad website.

🚌 Transit doesn’t run on buses alone — Kristin Taylor wrote up a fantastic deep dive into the complexity of the technology running transit systems. During a technology discovery project for MBTA’s paratransit service, The RIDE, her team found the problem wasn’t broken individual systems, it was disconnected ones. This is a classic issue we see across systems: teams rightfully look to solve the specific problems they have, but no one is charged with planning across the system. This is a loud case for the role of service design in government to not only better serve riders, but also help reservationists not have to hand-calculate fare balances, or schedulers to rely on CSV exports from one system to another.

🐻 California says its new hiring guide will save 500,000+ staff hours a year — The state is aiming to cut screening time per recruitment from 23.6 hours to under 5. How? By stopping scoring every applicant against exhaustive criteria, and only assessing minimum qualifications for the people who make it to the interview. This may seem boring, but these are the types of changes we need to see in civil service modernization. Get rid of processes that aren’t serving the ultimate goal: finding a qualified candidate to serve residents.

🗽 COGE releases its final report and five ballot proposals — After 10 hearings, 264 live testimonies (including mine — link to my written comment), and 603 written submissions, the NYC Commission on Government Efficiency landed on proposals New Yorkers will vote on this November: a centralized permitting hub, faster nonprofit contracting, and streamlined street safety approvals. They also announced that COGE will be continuing in a permanent structure as an advisory board. In addition to ballot proposals, they also put forth a set of internal reforms the City has already committed to adopting. The one I’m most excited about? Implementing service standards for OMB: review standard hires and promotions within 14 days and capital project initiation applications within 40 days. This is a drastic change from the 6-24 months I’ve heard about as anecdotal timelines for OMB reviews for new hires.

🗽 The NYC PIT Crew received 2,800 applications and is drawing real debate — Don Moynihan reads it as an investment in building capacity rather than outsourcing it. Matthew Burton warns that fly-in tech teams fix visible problems while leaving the underlying plumbing untouched, though he calls the preliminary COGE report the sharpest diagnosis of government IT he’s seen. And a two-hour hackathon run by folks in the state capacity ecosystem has already produced working prototypes for three of the mayor’s top priorities, including grocery-store siting and permitting navigation. We don’t know what will work, but the level of attention being paid to how government applies technology to meet policy priorities is, in my opinion, a positive thing.

🗽 Cities are providing powerful new tools to explore open and civic data - BetaNYC, a non-profit education and advocacy group for civic tech in NYC, has been releasing open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that connect AI assistants directly to NYC’s civic data like NYC Council legislation, city spending and contracts, 311 data, the City Record, the NYC Charter and Administrative Code, and more. In Boston, DOITT is developing Boston Core, a collection of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers empowering large language models and autonomous agents with safe, read-only access to Boston's open data portal.

Events

💻 Virtual: Preparing Community Partners for Medicaid Work Requirements — Civilla live demo of its work-requirements implementation tools, for anyone in state government or community organizations gearing up for the January 2027 deadline. Wednesday, August 5, 2–3pm ET.

🌦️ Seattle: Join Bloom Works and U.S. Digital Response for a Public Interest Tech Happy Hour on Thursday, August 6. Register here.

💻 Virtual: Join U.S. Digital Response for an overview of how to use innovative procurement strategies to modernize Medicaid technology on August 13. Register here.

📋 Virtual: FormFest is back! This annual event focuses on the way many folks interact with government: through forms. Learn about how governments across the country are using best practices and tools to deliver better services. September 16, 2026. Register here.

🍺 NYC: Join BetaNYC for a community “unconference” at CityCamp NYC 2026 on September 19. The focus will be democracy, civil society, neighbors, government operations, and the intersection between them all. Register here.

📚 Minneapolis: Join Abigail Fisher for a new sci-fi book club for people working in and around government. Each meeting will discuss a sci-fi book that examines government, civics and bureaucracy. The first meeting will take place on September 24. Learn more here.

Highlighted Teams and Roles

🎨 CODE PA is hiring a UX Designer. You will come into this role to lead meaningful work across both digital and offline services. They are looking for someone with strong design chops, a commitment to human‑centered and accessible design, and who enjoys big, complex, ambiguous problem spaces. You’ll be part of advancing both statewide services and the team’s design standards. play a key part in advancing statewide services and our design standards. Closes Aug 3.

🔑 Franklin County is hiring a Digital Product Owner to help manage the roadmap for their low-code/no-code CMS. You'd help make it easier for staff across 30+ agencies and offices break down digital roadblocks for the public. Upcoming projects include the digital accessibility roadmap, incorporating usability feedback into a navigation restructure, and building out feedback and reporting processes. Glamorous? No. The kind of work that takes as much patience as it pays back to the public? Yes.

🚌 The MBTA’s Technology Innovation Division is hiring a number of exciting roles including Deputy Director of UX Research and Design, Director of Platform Engineering, Software Engineers and more. After a decade as a scrappy department writing open-source software, the division is now a permanent, unionized department writing open-source software. Join the team modernizing how transit is delivered and helping transform from service teams to product teams with work impacting nearly 1 million riders daily. Closes Aug 10.

📚 Join the team at the DC Public Charter School Board building the data infrastructure behind consequential decisions about public education. As a Data Engineer for Analytics Products, you will work on production pipelines, governed data models, and analytics products that support school accountability, policy analysis, and transparent public reporting—not just move data between systems. They are building a modern, product-oriented Data Team, and the person in this role will have substantial influence over how systems are designed, documented, and improved.

💻 Partners for Public Good, a non-profit that helps state and local governments harness core operational functions like tech, procurement, staffing, and more to drive public impact. Join their new Technology Delivery team as a Project Leader or Associate, Technology to provide direct project support and capacity building to state and local teams in areas like AI piloting and adoption, software implementations, IT governance, and cybersecurity.

Open Roles

There are over 230 jobs listed right now at techjobsforgov.com and there are new ones added every day. The newsletter includes a selection of roles currently open.

UX, Design, Content and Innovation

🍎 Associate Director of Product Design | NYC Campaign Finance Board | up to $160k (closes Sept 27)

🔔 Senior Product Designer | Allegheny County Department of Information Technology | up to $115k

🦀 Senior Content Specialist | Baltimore County | up to $64/hr (closes Aug 12)

🌽 Senior User Experience Designer | Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget | up to $48/hr (closes Aug 4)

🏔️ Senior Service Designer (Remote From Anywhere In Colorado) | Colorado Office of Information Technology | up to $145k

Product & Program Management

🍀 Product Manager (Platform Engineering) | Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority | up to $140k (closes August 4)

🍀 Director of Public Digital Services | Massachusetts Executive Office of Education | up to $199k

🍎 Product Manager | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $150k (closes Sept 4)

🦀 Director of Technology, Customer Engagement Platforms | Amtrak | up to $232k

🌦️ Platforms Applications Manager | King County | up to $199k

🐻 Senior Director, Special Projects | LA Metro | up to $222k (closes Aug 3)

🇺🇸 Principal Product Manager | Federal Student Aid | up to $197k

💻 HR1 Coordination and Response Fellow | California Health and Human Services Agency | (closes Aug 3)

Emerging Tech

🍎 Senior Manager, Emerging Technology Planning | MTA | up to $138k

🍎 Specialist Software Engineer - AI | MTA | up to $135k

🐊 IT Architect (Responsible AI & Innovation) | City of Houston | up to $3k/wk (closes Aug 11)

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍎 Deputy Director for Performance, Accountability & Service Excellence | NYC Mayor's Office of Operations | up to $170k (closes Sept 22)

🍎 Data Product Analyst Supervisor | New Jersey Courts | up to $134k (closes Sept 4)

🦀 Senior Portfolio Manager/Data Scientist | Maryland State Retirement and Pension Systems | up to $292k (closes Aug 7)

🐊 Data Analyst Supervisor/Expert | Arkansas Department of Education | up to $144k (closes Aug 11)

🌽 Director, Performance Management | Chicago Transit Authority | up to $188k

🐻 Director, Systems Projects (Data Governance) | LA Metro | up to $200k (closes Aug 4)

🐻 Director of Data Services | First 5 Alameda County | up to $201k

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🦀 Senior AI Developer (Full-time Contract) | Maryland Department of Education | up to $80/hr (closes Aug 6)

🏔️ Digital Service Expert (Engineering) | Colorado Office of Information Technology | $130k (closes Aug 5)

🌦️ Senior Solutions Architect - Cloud | Sound Transit | up to $186k

🐻 Cloud Infrastructure Engineer | City of San Jose | up to $164k

Executive Leadership

🍀 Deputy Chief Digital Officer | Massachusetts Digital Service | up to $203k

🔔 Delivery Center Chief Information Officer | Pennsylvania General Government Delivery Center | up to $186k (closes Aug 7)

🐊 Chief Modernization Officer | Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality | up to $13k/month (closes Aug 4)

🐊 Senior Director, Technology Services | North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) | up to $141k (closes Aug 7)

🌦️ Deputy Executive Director - Strategic Partnerships | Sound Transit | up to $297k

🐻 Director of Technology & Innovation | City of Long Beach | up to $270k (closes Aug 10)

🐻 VP, Enterprise AI Strategy & Transformation | CA State Compensation Insurance Fund | up to $14k/month (closes Aug 7)

🐻 Chief, Enterprise Services | CA Department of General Services | up to $13k/month (closes Aug 4)

Know someone navigating a move into government tech? Forward this their way.

This Week in Public Sector Tech — July 17, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:00:52 GMT

📣 Hiring? Share your open roles in government or civic tech. Tech Jobs for Gov is a new job board for tech and innovation jobs in government and civic tech, open to all types of organizations. Government jobs are always free to post, with tiered pricing available to other types of organizations. Post at techjobsforgov.com/post-a-job.

News and Reads

🍎 New York City launched the Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crew earlier this week and took a huge step forward for in-house technology capability. The PIT Crew will consist of five in-house teams of product managers, designers, engineers, researchers, and data experts, embedded across city agencies to build digital tools in a matter of months instead of years. With $5.24 million in city funding built into the operating budget, this is a big commitment to rethinking how the city approaches technology. Working in a product model, the first team is already at work on a complaint portal, built with the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, to enforce the city’s new Click to Cancel rule. While 30 staff in a City that employs over 300,000 will not be able to address everything, the dedicated capacity and the mission to make interacting with government dignified and delightful for every New York is an important one. The teams are currently hiring for Senior Product Engineers, Senior Product Designers and Senior Product Managers.

🌺 Hawai’i is building a customer experience team inside of their Medicaid department. States are facing a hard deadline to implement Medicaid work requirements by Jan. 1, 2027, and the challenge of how to address this new administrative burden while continuing to deliver service has been one of the hardest challenges Medicaid agencies are facing. Hawai’i’s Med-QUEST decided that instead of staffing up for the short-term, they will build the in-house capacity needed to use an interactive approach to fix the real problems people are facing. They are hiring senior product managers, designers and software engineers with the help of Tech Talent Project. Learn more here.

🪢 New York State recently signed an executive order announcing a new effort, Regulatory Reset, to use AI to help state agencies eliminate or modernize antiquated requirements. There are over 18 million words of codified statute in New York State, and in partnership with Recoding America and Stanford University, state teams will review references found to fees; signature or notary requirements; fax, mail, telegraph and other outdated technologies; as well as task forces, councils and mandatory reports. One such mandatory report is on the state of sour cherries throughout New York; there are laws still on the books that require a special permit for a woman to work later hours. This work is related to the public call for suggestions to cut red tape announced earlier this year. See the executive order here.

👑The idea of digital sovereignty is reaching mainstream news and politicians. The New York Times reported this week on the European search for digital sovereignty, reducing dependency on tech from the United States and China. France's AI minister put it bluntly: full autonomy isn't realistic and the real question is what dependencies are acceptable. This is a massive challenge though. Europe doesn’t have the same type of venture capital or philanthropic culture that tech companies have come to rely on, and there is only one European large language model. But there will be billions spent over the next few years to try and make it a reality. Closer to home, the New York City Committee on Government Efficiency included the idea of digital sovereignty in their preliminary report about potential changes to the City Charter.

📋 Marci Harris of Popvox recently shared a prototype of a tool to help agencies understand the obligations they are under when a new law is put in place. This idea seems pretty obvious on the surface - if a law is developed that means that agencies need to do certain things, give them a list. But in reality, that isn’t how it works. Her substack piece “What if every new law came with a to-do list?” takes a look at what this could look like based on the recently enacted H.R. 6644, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that includes at least 208 obligations.

🚶 Sam Brenner from the City of Boston shared about Boston’s unique approach to changing how the city manages parking and curb space. In February, Boston launched Curb Lab to create and maintain a real-time digital understanding of parking regulations and build tools that help residents navigate parking. They now have a database covering the 700+ miles of Boston curb policies and are continuing to find unique ways to introduce new curb management policies.

🧑‍💻 Curious about vibe coding? Civic Tech Field Guide is hosting civic vibe coding show & tells to help demonstrate how people across the field are using new tools. Nathan Storey kicked off the series sharing his Civic AI tools, a set of bridges between all the open government data that has been published. Watch here.

🧑‍🎓 Stanford’s Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy for Practitioners course is open for applications. This course is very popular among folks in the civic tech community as a space to dive into discussion on some of the questions, like the ethics of AI use, that come up everyday. Applications are open until August 10, 2026. Apply and learn more here.

Events

🔍 Virtual: Join ChiHackNight for a talk on Auditing Police AI in Public - Lessons from the ShotSpotter Debate for the AI Era in Public Policy with Robert Vargars, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Justice Project at the University of Chicago. Tuesday, July 21, 2026. Register here.

🍩LA: Data + Donuts is hosting Dan Hoffman from LA County Planning to talk about LA County Planning’s Tree Hub. Thursday, July 23. Register here.

📞 Virtual: Join Nava Labs Demo Day to see their latest prototype. Nava Labs has developed a voice AI tool to help reduce caseworker documentation burden as part of their initiative exploring the potential of AI and other technologies to support caseworkers and families connecting with the social safety net. Thursday, July 23. Register here.

⛲Chicago/Virtual: Join ChiHackNight for an event with the Obama Foundation on Tuesday, July 28, 2026. Details to be announced. Register here.

🌦️ Seattle: Join Bloom Works and U.S. Digital Response for a Public Interest Tech Happy Hour on Thursday, August 6. Register here.

Highlighted Teams and Roles

🎨 Allegheny County, PA is hiring for their first dedicated UX design role - Senior Product Designer. This is a foundational moment for how the County builds and delivers digital services. The person who steps into this role will not be maintaining an existing design practice; they will be creating it.

📊 First 5 Alameda County is looking for a Director of Data Services. This is an exciting opportunity to lead the strategic direction of data services at an organization dedicated to improving outcomes for young children and families. You’ll drive data innovation, influence organizational strategy, and build a culture of data-informed decision-making while leading a talented team.

🐻 Help lead California’s response to One Big Beautiful Bill / H.R. 1 and strengthen the CalFresh and Medi-Cal safety net for millions of Californians as a mid/senior-level public service fellow. You’ll report into the California Health & Human Services (CalHHS) CIO, this is a high-impact, cross-functional role working across CalHHS, DHCS, CDSS, the Governor’s Office, ODI, LWDA, and other state agencies and departments to coordinate a statewide portfolio of HR1 response initiatives, support executive decision-making, and drive implementation.

🍀 The Massachusetts Executive Office of Education is hiring a Director of Public Digital Services. The person in this role will lead the team focused on the agency’s public digital service strategy, improving how constituents, families, educators, institutions, providers, and agency partners interact with the Education Secretariat’s programs and services online. You’ll work closely with Mass Digital Services and other secretariats to improve digital services across the Commonwealth.

🐻 The City of Long Beach is hiring a new Director of Technology & Innovation. Long Beach has long been one of the most innovative municipal IT organizations, but is looking for a leader to help through a period of modernization. Help define how the City works with AI, manages technology needs associated with the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games and more.

Select Open Roles

There are over 230 jobs listed right now at techjobsforgov.com and there are new ones added every day. The newsletter includes a selection of roles currently open.

UX, Design and Innovation

🍎 Senior Product Designer | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $160k (closes August 14)

🔔 Senior Product Designer | Allegheny County Department of Information Technology | up to $115k

🦀 Director of Digital Workplace Innovation | Maryland State Retirement and Pension System | up to $129k (closes July 31)

🦀 UX/UI Designer | Federal Student Aid - U.S. Department of Education | up to $173k (closes August 14)

🌺 Organizational Change Manager | State of Hawaii, Department of Accounting and General Services

Product & Program Management

🍀 Director of Public Digital Services | Massachusetts Executive Office of Education | up to $199k

🍀 Director of IT Product Strategy & Portfolio | Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Development (EOED) | up to $170k

🍎 Senior Product Manager (5 positions) | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $180k (closes August 14)

🍎 Product Manager | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $150k (closes September 4)

🏔️ Deputy Program Director of Service Delivery | Colorado Department of Revenue | up to $142k (closes July 26)

💻 HR1 Coordination and Response Fellow | California Health and Human Services Agency | (closes August 3)

Emerging Tech

🌦️ IT Project Manager – Senior/Specialist | Data & AI Governance Projects | Washington State Department of Transportation | up to $134k (closes July 19)

🐻 Broadband and AI Senior Analyst- Library Department | City of San Jose | up to $144k (closes July 27)

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍎 Data Scientist | NYC Consumer and Worker Protection | up to $101k (closes September 7)

🍎 Director of Administrative and Operational Analytics | NYC Department of Design & Construction | up to $153k (closes August 29)

🍎 Director of Analysis & Evaluation | NYC Emergency Management | up to $116k (closes August 9)

🍎 Director of Policy Metrics | NYC Office of Criminal Justice | up to $130k

🦀 Data Scientist (FT Contract) | Maryland Department of Health | up to $58/hr (closes July 21)

🦀 Data Analyst | Comptroller of Maryland | up to $80k (closes July 23)

🔔 Data Scientist | Allegheny County Department of Human Services | up to $120k (closes August 1)

🌽 Data Engineer & Program Analyst | Illinois State Treasurer, Data Team | up to $95k (closes July 31)

🌵 Data Governance Supervisor | Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System | up to $82k

🐻 Director of Data Services | First 5 Alameda County | up to $201k

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Senior Product Engineer (13 positions) | NYC Office of Technology and Innovation | up to $180k (closes August 14)

🍎 Application Developer for Capital Integrated Data Solutions | NYC Department of Parks and Recreation | up to $109k (closes July 24)

🐊 Lead AI Application Programmer Analyst | Tarrant County | up to $107k

🏔️ Lead Cloud Platform & Dev Ops Engineer (Remote within CO) | University of Colorado | $122k (closes August 14)

🏔️ Senior Delivery Engineer | Colorado Office of Information Technology | up to $145k

Executive Leadership

🌽 Information Technologies Director | City of Champaign | up to $226k (closes July 31)

🐻 Director of Technology & Innovation | City of Long Beach | up to $270k (closes August 10)

🐻 Chief of Knowledge Bank and Platform Services | CA Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation | up to $14k/month (closes July 20)

🐻 Associate Chief Information Officer | Santa Clara County | up to $365k (closes July 27)

Share #PublicSectorJobBoard

This Week in Public Sector Tech — July 2, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:40:29 GMT

📣 Tech Jobs for Gov— the job board companion to this newsletter — is now open for listings from the whole civic tech ecosystem. Government jobs are always free to post, and details about rates for other types of organizations are at techjobsforgov.com/post-a-job.

🗓️ Openings for August 1:1 navigation conversations. If you’re trying to figure out how to move into civic tech — or what your next move looks like once you’re there — reach out via civicworkstudio.com/contact with what you’re trying to figure out and your LinkedIn. These conversations are confidential. I’ll follow up with availability and rates.

What I’m Reading

📊 High Floor, Low Ceiling: How Public-Sector Wage Compression Erodes Public Service — Joe Eichenbaum explored the public sector wage gap and what it actually looks like when you dig into it. What he found? A high floor and a low ceiling. He argues that “pay workers more” isn’t necessarily the solution, but that it needs to be targeted, not across-the-board: raise the ceiling where the gap is real, not the whole scale. He also found that government doesn’t trail the market in all fields. Protective service workers (police, firefighters) earn far more than a private sector comparison. But for white-collar, highly educated, digitally skilled workers whose private sector pay has climbed the fastest, government is far behind.

📣 Sarah Tuneberg on Colorado OIT’s restructuring, four weeks in — Colorado’s new CIO released an honest take about the OIT restructuring four weeks in. Her framing: “announcement is not the same as achievement”. The real work is just getting started and happens in the thousands of individual decisions employees and agency partners make, not because leadership said so. She reaches for a maturity model over a dashboard, because a maturity model tells you what someone needs next, not just how they’re doing.

📣 Designing the Human Help That Government Technology Needs in the AI Era — Denise Linn Riedl (former South Bend CIO, now at Partners for Public Good) talked to 75+ government technology leaders, vendors, and funders and heard the same answer over and over: the gap isn't tools, it's people. IT capacity is the ceiling on what agencies can actually deliver, vendor accountability is inconsistent, and every function around technology like HR, procurement, and legal needs to build its own tech fluency, not just defer to IT.

🧩What We Recommend for Building Better Digital Service Teams, Initiatives, and Results — Earlier this year, the Federation of American Scientists and other partners hosted a series of retrospectives on digital services across the country, inviting staff (current and former) who worked on these initiatives to share their experiences. Based on these convenings, they recently shared their recommendations and findings for building better digital service teams and getting results. What they found is worth sitting with: As is, the digital government field cannot scale; and We built digital teams, not services. They end this piece with a series of recommendations by level of government that I know I will be digging further into. I’m excited to hear what others think.

🏛️ How Four States Put People at the Center of Benefits Delivery — Andrés Argüello from the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality recently shared a piece about how states are building people-centered digital benefits. A key finding is that the most consequential investments to delivery better benefits isn’t in the technology itself, but rather in making sure the right people are put in the right place, with the right expertise, in the right positions and with the right authority to make a difference.

🌐 Santi Garces on the infrastructure agentic AI actually requires — Boston’s CIO argues most states lack the basics an agentic future depends on: content management systems, centralized open data, managed API access, and a working identity layer. He and his collaborators are inviting comments on their concept paper on open civic agentic infrastructure.

🪑 The Three-Legged Stool of Government Digital Product Delivery — Chaeny Emanavin, the Deputy State Chief Technology Officer in California, shared a piece build on his vast experience about why government projects can hit every milestone, on time and on budget, and still fail. His main takeaway is that project management alone doesn’t account for whether anyone actually wants to use what got built. He makes the case for product management as a distinct, necessary function alongside project management and scrum masters.

🧾 SNAP Payment Error Rates (FY2025): A Measure of Capacity, Not Fraud — , the AI Safety Net Resident at Propel, shared his independent analysis of the new state-by-state payment error rates for SNAP that were released on June 24. These error rates now carry financial penalties for states, with some looking at hundreds of millions of dollars, but he calls out that administrative errors and wrongful denial errors (leading to more hunger) are scrutinized on the same scale. He makes the case that the metric mostly tracks administrative bandwidth and how many eligible people a state actually serves, not fraud, while the denial-side error rate, wrongly turning away eligible families, runs nearly four times higher than payment errors and carries no penalty at all.

♿ “You Didn’t Understand What They Meant”: The Hidden Barrier of Cognitive Accessibility — from the Beeck Center shared the first part of a storytelling series about the role of cognitive accessibility in digital government services. Digital accessibility is a complex topic that is often seen as an aside or as one person’s job to think about, but this piece hones in on why the DOJ’s Title II accessibility ruling matters and what the lack of accessibility means in practice.

📝 A Field Guide to Fix Government Forms Is Live — I came across the The Lab @ DC’s practical, reusable guide to diagnosing and fixing government forms. If you’re interested in how to make forms that don’t suck, consider what they share in this guide alongside the lessons from Elham’s accessibility piece above.

Events

📞Virtual: Join InnovateUS for the rest of their summer 2026 series on Reimagining the Public Contact Center. Join on July 8 for Inside the Modernization of High-Volume Call Centers and on July 15 for Helping the Helpers: AI Tools for Frontline Resident Service. Register here.

🎬Virtual: Hear from staff from Alabama and Minnesota about how they are using data to monitor their programs, determine effectiveness and adapt programs over time, including the organizational challenges that come with it. Tuesday, July 14. Register here.

🤝Portland: Join for a reunion of the Portland Digital Corps. Whether you were a member of the previous cohort or just interested in civic tech, meet others who share your interests. Tuesday, July 14. Register here.

📈Virtual: Curious about how data is being used in government? Join Joe Eichenbaum from 17A and Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley for a conversation about implementing performance principles in government, how data was used in violent crime reduction in Dallas and how teams can use data to prioritize what to do when there is limited capacity. Wednesday, July 15. Register here.

🌉SF: The Civic Happy Hour in SF is back! If you’re interested in civic tech or civic engagement, join current and former White House Presidential Innovation Fellows and the U.S. Digital Corps to meet others doing interesting work. The plan is for the event to take place every third Tuesday of the month. Tuesday, July 21. Register here.

🌺NYC: Join AI for Good NYC for their first AI for Good meetup. Meet others in the non-profit and social good space to talk about AI, learn from each other and think about what the social impact community wants and needs from AI. Tuesday, July 21. Register here.

Highlighted Teams and Roles

🧗Colorado is continuing to staff up its restructured Office of Information Technology and has openings across fields. This is an exciting opportunity to join an organization leading the way in what the future of government technology can look like. If you missed it, check out their restructuring announcement and my take on it. Open roles (all remote within CO) including Director of Technology, Senior Product Managers, Senior Service Designers, Senior Delivery Managers, Senior Delivery Engineers, Data Architect, Principal Data Operations Engineer.

🔔Philadelphia is hiring for some unique roles in their IT department to help support their work to implement new IT directions throughout the City. Some of the roles currently open include Technology Partnerships & Innovation Manager, Technical Relationship Manager, Product & Services Portfolio Manager and more.

🌳The City of Thousand Oaks recently established an Information Technology Department and are focused on building a modern, service-oriented organization focused on innovation, operational excellence, and delivering value to the community. They have two leadership openings in Data & Delivery and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

🚌 Metro Transit in Minneapolis is hiring an executive Assistant General Manager, Experience and Innovation, to lead customer experience, employee experience and business technology. You’ll function as the chief innovator for the agency, working to improve not only operational efficiency but also customer satisfaction, employee engagement and organizational culture.

🍎 New York City Office of Information Technology is staffing up under the new administration and is hiring for five Senior Product Managers, thirteen Senior Product Engineers, and nine Senior Product Designers.

Select Open Roles

There are over 230 jobs listed right now at techjobsforgov.com and there are new ones added every day. The newsletter includes a selection of roles currently open.

UX, Design and Innovation

🍀 User Experience (UX) Designer | Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority | up to $140k (closes July 14)

🍎 Content Manager & Copy Editor: Focus UX/Accessibility | New York State Office of the Attorney General | up to $87k (closes July 10)

🍎 Health Data User Researcher | NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Data Technology & Strategy | up to $126k (closes August 25)

🦀 UX/UI Designer | Federal Student Aid - U.S. Department of Education | up to $173k (closes August 14)

🦀 Performance and Innovation Manager | City of Fairfax, VA | up to $161k (closes July 12)

🐊 Service Integration and Improvement Analyst | Guilford County Government, Integrated Data and Services | up to $87k (closes July 27)

🐊 Service Designer | City of Mobile | up to $75k (closes July 21)

🌦️ Applications and Innovation Analyst | Snohomish County 911 | up to $159k (closes July 7)

🐻 Senior User Research Analyst | Port of San Francisco | up to $169k (closes July 6)

🐻 Innovation Program Manager | County of Marin | up to $152k (closes July 14)

🇺🇲 UX/UI Designer (GS 13) | Federal Student Aid | up to $173k (closes July 30)

Product & Program Management

🍎 Senior Cloud Architect & Program Manager | The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey | up to $236k

🍎 Innovation Technologist | New York City Department of Design & Construction | up to $106k (closes July 18)

🦀 Product Development Lead, Service Design & Technology | Amtrak | up to $122k

🐊 Portfolio Delivery Manager | State of Louisiana | up to $11k/month (closes July 7)

🐊 Technical Product Analyst | State of South Carolina | up to $120k (closes July 16)

🐻 Portfolio Manager | CA Office of Data and Innovation | up to $166k (closes July 10)

🐻 Portfolio Management & Governance Office Chief | CA Department of Public Health | up to $13k (closes July 3)

💻 Product Manager (InnovateNJ) | New Jersey Innovation Authority | up to $145k

Emerging Tech

🐊 AI Solutions Delivery Lead | South Carolina Department of Education | up to $134k (closes July 16)

🌽 Director of Digital Transformation and Learning | City of Rochester | up to $170k

🐻 AI and Privacy Senior Analyst - Information Technology Department | City of San Jose | up to $144k (closes July 2)

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍀 Senior Data Engineer | Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services | up to $154k

🍎 Data Engineer | NYC Department of City Planning | up to $112k (closes August 3)

🍎 Director of Applied Data Science and Solutions | NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene | up to $150k (closes August 8)

🍎 Data Engineer | NYC Department of Sanitation | up to $140k (closes August 24)

🔔 Data Scientist | Allegheny County Department of Human Services | up to $120k (closes August 1)

🐊 Senior Data and Governance Analyst | Guilford County Government, Integrated Data and Services | up to $93k (closes July 27)

🌽 Assistant Director of Data and Artificial Intelligence | Metropolitan Airports Commission | up to $203k (closes July 15)

🏔️ Senior Data Analyst | City of Boulder | up to $137k

🐻 Data Engineer, Platform Modernization | CalOptima | up to $160k (closes July 12)

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 QA Automation Engineer | NYC Department of Finance | up to $130k

🌽 Analyst for Web Applications | Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget | up to $100k (closes July 15)

🏔️ Lead Web Application and Software Engineer | Colorado Department of Higher Education | up to $93k (closes July 12)

🐻 Modernization Engineering Project Lead | Port of San Francisco | up to $215k (closes July 6)

Executive Leadership

🍀 Director, Medicaid Platforms & Products - Medicaid Enterprise Systems (MES) | MA Executive Office of Health and Human Services | up to $170k

🍎 Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives | NYC Housing Authority | up to $190k (closes August 8)

🌦️ Chief Information Officer | Washington Department of Ecology | up to $173k (closes July 16)

🐻 Chief Information and Innovation Officer | County of Marin | up to $299k (closes July 7)

🐻 Associate Chief Information Officer | Santa Clara County | up to $365k (closes July 27)

🐻 Assistant Deputy Director, Chief Artificial Intelligence and Security Operations Officer | CA Department of Public Health | up to $14k (closes July 29)

This Week in Public Sector Tech — June 18, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:46:20 GMT

🗓️ A small number of openings for 1:1 navigation conversations. If you’re trying to figure out how to move into civic tech — or what your next move looks like once you’re there — reach out via civicworkstudio.com/contact with what you’re trying to figure out and your LinkedIn. These conversations are confidential. I’ll follow up with availability and rates.

Deep-Dive: New York is updating the city charter

The NYC Commission on Government Efficiency held its first public hearings earlier this month. COGE is a charter revision commission, meaning it has the authority to put amendments to New York City’s governing constitution directly in front of voters. One of the hearing topics was modernizing government technology and civil service hiring.

These processes are wonky and political, and they don’t always produce change. But they occasionally open a window for outside technical expertise to reach leaders and the public, leading to open discussion about what the role of government is and what type of change is possible.

I testified at the Brooklyn hearing on June 11. The argument I made: the Charter already mandates merit hiring and effective service delivery, but creates no structural mechanism to verify either. The fix doesn’t have to be new legislation. It can be a clock and accountability structure built into the Charter itself. Read my testimony here.

Others who testified the same night made arguments worth highlighting on their own terms:

, a public servant working in digital service delivery who spoke in her personal capacity, made the case for digital service teams and against large IT contracts. Her core point: contracting creates a constant structural tax on efficiency because vendors are always optimizing for business development, not service delivery. The alternative isn’t better contracts but rather small, empowered, multi-disciplinary teams hired directly inside agencies. Her testimony is here and includes a great list of other resources.
BetaNYC testified on digital sovereignty with the argument that as long as the city pays private vendors for foundational digital infrastructure, it’s paying a toll on its own operations. They draw an analogy to the Croton Aqueduct: in the 1840s, the city decided it wouldn’t pay a licensing fee every time a fire hydrant opened. That logic should extend to the software that hosts the city’s own laws and services. Jordan Shapiro’s full testimony is on BetaNYC’s site.
Robert Gordon, writing from Recoding America Fund, made the civil service reform case: New York City has roughly twice as many vacancies as before the pandemic, a fourteen-month exam-to-hire timeline, and 2,600 job titles, many with names nobody outside the system recognizes. Other large cities like Boston, Denver, and Seattle don’t operate this way. The complexity isn’t preventing corruption anymore; it is creating workarounds that favor the well-connected and pushing the city toward contractors who cost more. His piece is here.

There were many other important takes on these issues, but at it’s core: we need to rethink how the city buys and builds technology, and the systems that enable it, to ensure that we can deliver an affordable New York now and for the future.

If you’re in New York City: The commission’s next hearing is July 8 in Manhattan. Written public comment is open at nyc.gov/site/charter/meetings/public-comment.page.

If you’re not in New York: I don’t have a comprehensive map of where the equivalent opportunities are, but most cities and states have formal processes to make charter and other changes. These types of processes, whether charter revision processes, legislative sessions, and executive commissions, open a window where showing up matters and offer an opportunity to learn more about how government works. If you’re aware of something like that in your community, check it out.

Know someone navigating a move into government tech? Forward this their way.

Reads

👶 Two million fewer children are enrolled in Medicaid: Georgetown’s Center for Children and Families shared this stark view on what is already happening, even before full HR1 cuts take effect. Two million fewer children are enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP since January 2025, mostly among kids who likely still qualify. The drop is procedural due to enrollment churn, administrative burden, and renewal failures. We won’t know the full effect for years, but this is what many teams in and outside of government are trying to prevent.

🏥 A UX guide for Medicaid work requirements — Sarah Esty and the team at 17a shared a new resource focused on the member experience of Medicaid work requirements. While much of the focus has been on the backend, we’ve already seen data that when Arkansas and New Hampshire implemented work requirements, 72-82% of people who had to complete a manual renewal failed. These are overwhelmingly people who were working, exempt from work requirements or who just couldn’t navigate the system. This guide is meant for states to help know where they stand and what UX elements they may need to focus on before 2027.

🏗️ The 2027 capacity stack — Kelly Taylor, one of the co-founders of Colorado Digital Service, shared his perspective on what the civic tech field should be doing before incoming governors are sworn in. There are 39 gubernatorial elections on the 2026 calendar, at least 21 guaranteed transitions. He notes that too many states have to relearn the same lessons from scratch, and we miss valuable time and opportunity when states have to relearn this themselves. He shares 9 recommendations for what we should do as a field before inauguration days to build better systems and structures around the tools we have.

🗂️ The policy simplification problem — Lena Selzer at Civilla shared why AI in government is a policy problem before it's a technology problem. A state caseworker making a benefits determination works from a 1,700-page policy manual and then must balance conflicting guidance, central office memos, and supervisor interpretations that may or may not align. There's a lot of talk about encoding policy rules to be machine-legible. But in most agencies, the rules themselves aren't legible yet. The human work of sitting side-by-side with caseworkers to surface what actually happens when a case gets processed, not the idealized process, is unglamorous, hard to fund, and the thing that determines whether everything else works.

🌐 Beyond translation: the case for content localization — Vyki Englert wrote for the Compiler blog on why hardcoding Google Translate into a government website isn’t enough, even if it satisfies a legal checkbox. True language access means preventing errors and translating how people speak and understand, not a word-by-word exact translation that misses the meaning entirely. When translation isn’t built in from the start, people navigating benefits eligibility get routed wrong, miss deadlines, and lose access to services they qualify for.

🏛️ CMS established Office of Health Technology and Products — Effective June 9, CMS formalized its digital service function under a new office that includes Digital Service at CMS, an Open Source Program Group, a Standards and Interoperability Group, and a Product Development Group.

🛠️ Why projects get stuck and how to unblock them — Bloom Works recently shared a piece on three recurring failure modes in government tech projects: designing solutions before understanding the problem, losing strategic ownership as work moves fast, and planning a single launch instead of continuous improvement. They pulled on practitioner experience to understand how a product manager can be helpful in moving projects along.

Events and opportunities

🍺 NYC: BetaBuilders: Pride Tech Night: BetaNYC is celebrating Pride Month and the queer tech and data community in an evening with lightning talks, networking, and a special announcement. June 23, 6–8pm. $30 includes entry and two drink tickets.

🍑 Atlanta: Civics 101 — The Center for Civic Innovation is hosting a hands-on session on how City Hall works, what neighborhood planning units actually do, and how to shape real policy change. June 23, 6–9pm. Free and reduced-cost tickets available.

💻 Virtual: Digital Services Retros Launch: The Federation of American Scientists and Georgetown’s Beeck Center are presenting findings from their Digital Services Retros project. Speakers include Sarah Tuneberg, CIO of Colorado’s Office of Information Technology, and Rebecca Piazza, the Executive Director of Safety Net Strategy at Code for America. June 25, 11:30am–1pm ET. Free.

🎓 Virtual: AI Government Leadership Program — Applications are open for Partnership for Public Service’s free four-month cohort program for state and local government executives and federal GS-15s and SES members. Six half-day sessions, September through December 2026. Apply by July 10. Free.

🍺 NYC: Civic Tech’ish Summer 2026 — Join for NYC’s most popular happy hour for civic tech practitioners and meet public servants, consultants, technologists, and community organizers. Downtown Brooklyn. July 14, 6–8pm. Registration required.

Select Open Roles

There are over 180 jobs listed right now at techjobsforgov.com and there are new ones added every day. The newsletter includes a selection of roles currently open.

UX, Design and Innovation

🍎 Senior Product Designer | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $160k (closes Aug 14)

🍎 Content Manager & Copy Editor: Focus UX/Accessibility | New York State Office of the Attorney General | up to $87k (closes July 10)

🍎 Knowledge Base Content Strategist | NYC Housing Authority | $80k (closes July 2)

🌽 Customer Experience Manager | SouthWest Transit (MN) | up to $131k

🐻 Enterprise Innovation Unit Analyst | CA Department of Social Services | up to $8k (closes June 23)

Product & Program Management

🍎 Innovation Technologist | New York City Department of Design & Construction | up to $106k (closes July 18)

🍎 Assistant Director, Research, RFx, and Portfolio Management | New York State Office of General Services | up to $145k (closes June 26)

🍎 Engineering Technology Manager | The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey | up to $160k

🍎 Strategic Analyst | NYC Campaign Finance Board | up to $90k (closes Aug 9)

🍎 Efficiency Business Integrator | NYC Office of the Mayor | up to $175k (closes Aug 8)

🔔 Product Analyst 2, PLCB | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania | up to $90k (closes June 23)

🦀 Product Development Lead, Service Design & Technology | Amtrak | up to $122k

🏔️ Deputy Director - Office of eHealth Innovation (OeHi) | State of Colorado | up to $107k (closes June 28)

🌦️ Product Owner | State of Washington | up to $101k (closes June 25)

🌦️ Digital & Data Services Supervisor | Oregon Metro | up to $142k (closes June 29)

💻 Lead Product Manager | Exygy/Bloom Housing | up to $160k (closes June 22)

Emerging Tech

🍎 AI Project Lead | Kings County District Attorney’s Office | up to $140k (closes June 23)

🌽 Director of Digital Transformation and Learning | City of Rochester | up to $170k

🌽 AI Strategy & Enablement Service Delivery Analyst | Metropolitan Council | up to $133k (closes June 26)

🏔️ Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Policy Director | State of Colorado | up to $12k/month (closes June 23)

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍀 Senior Data Engineer | Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services | up to $154k

🍎 Data Engineer | NYC Department of City Planning | up to $112k (closes Aug 3)

🍎 Director of Applied Data Science and Solutions, Bureau of Data Technology & Strategy | NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene | up to $150k (closes Aug 8)

🍎 Director of System Integration | NYC Department of Youth & Community Development | up to $160k (closes Aug 11)

🔔 Director of CRM and Data Analytics | Philadelphia International Airport | up to $145k

🌽 Senior Data Scientist | Metropolitan Council | up to $144k (closes June 21)

🐻 Data Engineer | CA Department of Education | up to $11k/month (closes June 22)

🐻 Data Architect | CA High Speed Rail Authority | up to $13k/month

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Software Engineering Manager, Research | New York Public Library | up to $155k

🍎 QA Automation Engineer | NYC Department of Finance | up to $130k

🍎 Software Developer | NYC Department of Finance | up to $150k (closes June 19)

🍎 Software Developer | NYC Department of Small Business Services | up to $127k (closes July 9)

🔔 Principal Software Engineer | City of Philadelphia | up to $124k

🦀 UI Systems Lead Engineer | State of Maryland | up to $103k (closes June 26)

🦀 Cottage Applications Developer | Maryland Department of Human Services | $47.65/hr (contract) (closes June 23)

🌽 Hexagon Octave Technical Lead (Principal Software Engineer) | Metropolitan Council | up to $164k (closes July 8)

🐻 Software Application Developer | CA Department of Justice | up to $11k/month (closes June 29)

🐻 Software Quality Analyst | CA Department of Transportation (Caltrans) | up to $9k/month (closes June 22)

💻 Engineering - Senior Tech Lead | Maryland Digital Service | up to $175k (closes August 31)

💻 Director of Engineering | Exygy/CiviForm | up to $195k (closes June 22)

Executive Leadership

🍎 Chief Technology Officer | State of Delaware | up to $147k (closes June 29)

🍎 Assistant Commissioner, Mass Engagement | NYC Department of Sanitation | up to $180k (closes July 24)

🍎 Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives | NYC Housing Authority | up to $190k (closes August 8)

🐊 Chief Information Officer - CIO | South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities | up to $249k (closes June 28)

🐻 Chief Information and Innovation Officer | County of Marin | up to $299k (closes July 7)

🐻 Chief Information Officer | Covered California | up to $35k/month (closes July 3)

🐻 Assistant Chief Information Officer | San Bernardino County | up to $259k (closes June 19)

💻 Chief AI Engineer | CA Office of Data and Innovation | up to $195k

What I Said to New York City's Commission on Government Efficiency

Rebecca Heywood — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:33:04 GMT

On June 11, 2026, I testified before the New York City Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) at a Brooklyn hearing on modernizing government and streamlining government technology. COGE is a Charter Revision Commission with the authority to propose amendments to New York City’s Charter, the city’s foundational governing document. Proposed amendments will go before voters in November.

What follows is the testimony I prepared to deliver. I had to cut and adjust in the room to stay within the time limit, so this is slightly more complete than what I actually said. The full hearing, which includes testimony from a range of New Yorkers on government technology and modernization, is available online. You can watch my testimony here. Alongside my in-person testimony, I submitted a longer written comment with more detail, sources, and specific recommendations. I'll share that here in a future post.

Good evening, Chair Gaspard and members of the Commission. My name is Rebecca Heywood.

I am a former city employee at DOT, DCAS and Emergency Management, and a technologist who has advised senior state and local government leaders on digital services, tech procurement and workforce strategy in jurisdictions across the country. I also run a job board and newsletter helping technologists move from the private sector into government that reaches thousands of people each week. I hear every day from the very people this city wants to hire.

Technology is vital to how the city runs and how New Yorkers receive services, like much of the rest of our world today. Others have talked about the effectiveness of digital services, but the city does not have the mechanism to hire these types of experts at scale. It has also been a struggle to hold vendors accountable for the technology products and outcomes they deliver.

We rely on external vendors to build, maintain and operate vital systems for delivering on city policy goals, and make build-versus-buy decisions without sufficient internal capacity to be savvy customers. We don’t have enough people who understand how modern technology is built and to know if a vendor is telling the truth about what they can deliver. We can’t always choose deliberately between building in-house and buying. And we struggle to hold vendors accountable that what they deliver actually works.

A recent analysis of city spending data found NYC spent at least $769 million last year on outside digital services. We owe it to ourselves and the city to ensure that this is leading to the outcomes we want to see. There are numerous examples from across the country that internal digital teams can build more quickly at a lower cost, ensuring residents can access services more easily and more quickly.

There are a number of limitations to being able to hire these types of teams.

Our hiring system lacks transparency for candidates and agencies on rules and procedures, on hiring timelines and on other issues. This has real impacts on the careers of city employees, workload of waiting colleagues, on the lives of potential City employees and on residents receiving services. I’ve heard dozens of stories about difficult decisions about people’s experiences trying to join the city and whether to wait to start a city job. They don’t know which exam they should take, don’t know how to represent their experience in a way to pass an E&E exam, and may have no insight into how long they may need to wait to start a job after receiving an offer. I heard this week about employees who waited six months, eleven months and over two years between offer and approval to start.

A six-month or more wait between offer and start is a financial filter. It selects for people in stable jobs, with savings, or family to fall back on. It screens out exactly the New Yorkers this city is made of.

The standard in technology development has been a product-based model for decades in the private sector, but this has only been changing in government in the last ten years or so. This requires different skill sets and work styles than a traditional IT model. New York City has a small number of teams and staff working in this way, like NYC Planning Labs and NYC Opportunity, who have delivered products like Access NYC and the digital Zoning and Land Use map that have been widely acclaimed. But there is no civil service pathway to hire the type of staff needed to build on models like this. We cannot hire staff at scale with skills like product managers, user researchers, data scientists needed to deliver more like this. Titles like Computer System Manager and Computer Associate don’t always align with the backgrounds of people who would excel in these roles or who may have been trained in non-traditional ways, and fitting specialized skills into ill-fitting titles may mean that the candidates a hiring manager can interview do not have the skills they need, meaning the process may need to start over. Others have mentioned that in some cases, agencies will then hire external contractors at a higher cost in order to get the skills they need.

In my work at DCAS, I saw a consistent pattern. The people who knew about and could navigate the civil service exam process successfully disproportionately had a family member or close friend already working for the city. If you now must know someone who can guide you, if you do not have those connections, you may struggle to get a city job. Through all of this, the city loses people it would genuinely like to hire and who genuinely want to work in public service because they simply cannot wait.

On the vendor side, our procurement models make it challenging to keep vendors accountable and for the City to deliver the outcomes we want to see for a reasonable price.

The MyCity platform took four years, over $100 million and involved more than 120 contracts. The Comptroller found it largely rebranded existing websites. Its chatbot told employers they could take workers’ tips, and told landlords they could turn away tenants with housing vouchers. Both are illegal under New York law.

The city paid one vendor $110 million to build its permitting system. It relies on the vendor to make even small changes using costly contract amendments.

And if vendors don’t deliver, the city often pays them again to fix it because they own the product, or because starting a new procurement would take years.

There are changes that will need to be made outside of the charter in state laws, in collective bargaining or through changes to management practices, but there are ways the Charter can support ensuring accountability for merit and fitness leading to effective service delivery.

Section 813 already gives the Civil Service Commission the power and duty to review how personnel administration works. It also needs the duty to regularly answer the question: do agencies have the personnel they need, in the right titles, to deliver services effectively?

The city’s technology governance needs to be in the Charter, not just in an executive order. We need regular verification, on a defined cycle, that our technology investments are actually delivering the outcomes we want to see whether built internally or by contract, and mechanisms to make changes if they are not.

And finally, there needs to be requirements to share data publicly and transparently on where time is lost in the hiring process, from position approval through offer to start date, as well as transparency with candidates and employees on offer terms, hiring timelines and changes to them. Without them, the people who can navigate this system are the people who already know how it works.

New York is a city that is constantly changing. It deserves a government designed to change with it. Thank you.

The Commission is holding public hearings through mid-July, and written public comments are open. If you want to attend a future hearing, submit a comment, or follow the work, visit the COGE website.

This Week in Public Sector Tech - June 5, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:01:29 GMT

📣 Tech Jobs for Gov, the job board companion to this newsletter, is now open for paid listings from civic tech organizations. Government jobs are always free to post. If your organization is hiring, or you know one that is: techjobsforgov.com/post-a-job.

🗓️ Something new. I’m offering 1:1 conversations for people figuring out their next move in civic tech, whether that’s getting in, moving up, or deciding if it’s right for you. I’m starting with a small number of spots. Reach out via civicworkstudio.com/contact with what you’re trying to figure out and your LinkedIn. These conversations are confidential. I’ll follow up with availability and rates.

Reads

🏔️ State modernization is having a moment, and Colorado is the one to watch. This week, Colorado’s Office of Information Technology restructured entirely around a product delivery model. There’s a new CIO, a public acknowledgement of failure patterns and significant changes to the structure of the workforce. Government IT fails constantly. It almost never admits it. Colorado just did, and committed to changing. I wrote about what makes this unusual and what’s at stake. The StateScoop report has the operational detail, and and Kelly Taylor explain why the digital service was never the point and how six years of Colorado Digital Service work made this reset possible. Maryland is also making a modernization bet, launching an AI Innovation Lab inside DoIT to move AI pilots into long-term agency implementation. The real question both are asking is: how do you make modernization stick?

📊 , CDO at the City and County of San Francisco, writes about what the CDO role actually is and why it’s almost never what people think. The job isn’t building something new. It’s excavation: understanding what already exists, why it exists, and what it would actually take to change it. Brownfield, not greenfield.

📋 Merici Vinton’s Sacred Cows piece for FAS is a warning against complacency. Government has accumulated its current complexity layer by layer, often without anyone stopping to ask why things are done the way they are. Digital services teams risk doing the same thing if we build on top of unexamined assumptions instead of changing the underlying habits.

👩‍💻 , a former DHS AI Corps engineer who left on deferred resignation, shared a year-in reflection on building an independent practice instead of going back to a salaried role. An honest account of what that transition actually looks like.

💼 Work for America's government hiring landscape report, From the Frontlines 2026, found that governments are struggling to move candidates through the process, not attract them. A real example: the U.S. Tech Force set out to hire 1,000 technologists last year and has onboarded 10 so far.

🔎 Erica Olsen makes the case that charging citizens for public records requests is the wrong fix for the right problem. AI is flooding government inboxes with records requests at scale and the burden on staff is real, but a fee is still a paywall.

📖 The New Jersey Innovation Authority published a piece on what it means to be open by default: new repositories public from the first commit, MIT license as standard, and clear documentation so anyone who finds the code can actually use it. Simple, principled, and worth borrowing.

🗽 Charter revision commissions are a regular feature of NYC politics, usually used for narrow political purposes. Mayor Mamdani dissolved the last-minute commission Eric Adams convened on his final day in office and replaced it with the Commission on Government Efficiency, focused on removing bureaucratic barriers, modernizing operations, and streamlining service delivery. Public hearings start June 9, with the Brooklyn hearing on June 11 focused specifically on government technology. A City & State op-ed argues it should go big and not repeat the incremental approach of recent commissions. I wrote about what civil service reform actually requires and what it will take for the city to deliver last fall. The analysis still holds.

Events

🍻 NYC: TechCongress and NYC Tech Policy are hosting a Happy Hour on Monday, June 8 to celebrate the beginning of TechCongress’ recruitment cycle for their January 2027 Congressional Innovation Fellowships. Register here.

🍻 DC: The CX COI June Social Hour is on June 11 from 5-8:30pm, right next door to the Government Service Delivery Summit. Meet the people working on customer experience, digital services, and modernization, talking after the agenda ends. Walk-ins welcome. LinkedIn event here.

💼 DC: TechCongress is hosting an alumni panel on June 17 in DC for the January 2027 fellowship recruitment cycle. Current and former fellows will talk about their work during and after the fellowship. FAQs here if you’re considering applying.

🖥️ Virtual: The National Tech to Gov Virtual Hiring Forum and Job Fair is on June 18, 12-3pm ET. Nine state Medicaid and digital services agencies, including Colorado OIT, Maryland Digital Service, NJ Medicaid, and Utah DTS, for one-on-one conversations and live sessions. Free to attend. Register here.

🏳️‍🌈 NYC: BetaNYC is hosting Pride Tech Night on Tuesday, June 23. Join for Pride-focused lightning talks and an announcement about new community projects in NYC. Register here.

🛠️ NYC: Civic Roundtable and from NYCuriosity are hosting a The State Capacity AI Hackathon on June 24. Pick a real government problem and ship something by the end of night. Register for location details: lu.ma/70zgy7ix

Highlighted Teams and Roles

🚆Amtrak is hiring a Product Development Lead, Service Design & Technology to join the team improving the onboard, in-station, and lounge experience for Amtrak customers. The lead will not only partner with the Digital Technology team to prioritize and implement digital products and enhancements, but also support the rollout of new products and services to frontline teams. This is a unique role that crosses digital and physical experiences.

💻 Hack Your Summer 2026. Join Coding it Forward for a free 4-week virtual sprint for US college students and recent grads to build real, public-facing projects in areas like software, data science, civic policy, journalism. There are two sessions starting June 15 and July 13. Learn more here.

💼 The Manhattan DA’s Office is one of the most innovative and data driven prosecutor’s offices in the USA. As Deputy Director of Research and Analytics, you’ll be able to work directly with both senior leaders and front-line practitioners. You’ll help architect new data products and projects that help the people of Manhattan both understand public safety in their community and also improve outcomes for specific justice-impacted people.

💸As a Data Scientist with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP), you will be part of the team that advances the mission to protect injured workers and their families by ensuring claims decisions and benefits are timely, appropriate, and accurate. By evaluating options, designing and carrying out complex research and analysis, and translating technical findings for diverse audiences, you directly help safeguard public resources and support injured workers in returning to gainful employment.

🦀 The Maryland Digital Service is hiring a Senior Tech Lead to join their team advancing the digital experience for Marylanders. The team’s goal is simple: to increase public trust in government by creating digital experiences that are clear, easy, accessible, and effective for all Marylanders to use. The Senior Tech Lead partners closely with a Product Manager and a UX Designer to form the core leadership trio responsible for delivery and serves as the senior-most engineering expert embedded within a major state agency’s technology initiative. This role is accountable for defining and executing the technical strategy of a high-impact product or system central to agency operations. Apply here.

🏔️As part of the Colorado Office of Information Technology reorg, they are in a hiring frenzy to support the cross-functional, product-oriented development teams dedicated to each state agency. There are openings for Senior Delivery Engineers, Senior Service Designers, Senior Product Managers and more, including Enterprise Practice Leads in Engineering, Product Management, Data, Service Design and more. All roles are remote within Colorado, with many agency partners based in Denver. Check out all of the open roles here.

🌦️The Washington Department of Labor and Industry is hiring a Deputy Assistant Director for Strategy, Technology, and Innovation to oversee the division’s product portfolio and technology strategy supporting the modernization of workers’ compensation systems.

Open Roles

A selection of open roles below— not everything fits in the newsletter. Find the full board, updated daily, at techjobsforgov.com.

UX, Design and Innovation

🍎 Associate Director of Product Design | NYC Campaign Finance Board | up to $160k (closes June 13)

🍎 Manager, Innovation Administration & Analytics | Long Island Rail Road | up to $141k

🦀 Content Strategist, Consumer Experience | Maryland Department of Information Technology | $52/hr (contract)

🏔️ Enterprise Practice Lead (Service Design) (Remote From Anywhere In Colorado) | Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology | up to $145k (closes June 10)

🏔️ Senior Service Designer (Remote From Anywhere In Colorado) | State of Colorado | up to $145k

💻 UX Design Lead | Colorado Benefits Eligibility and Enrollment Systems (CoBEES) | $140/hr (contract)

Product & Program Management

🍎 Engineering Technology Manager | The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey | up to $160k

🍎 Associate Director, IT Products & Business Relations | New York Public Library | up to $160k

🦀 Product Development Lead, Service Design & Technology | Amtrak | up to $122k

🌽 Service Owner (Job Number: 419305) | City of Chicago | up to $98k (closes June 9)

🏔️ Senior Delivery Manager (Remote from anywhere in Colorado) | Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology | up to $145k

🏔️ Senior Product Manager (Remote from anywhere in CO) | State of Colorado | up to $145k

🌦️ L&I Deputy Assistant Director for Strategy, Technology, and Innovation | State of Washington | up to $170k (closes June 8)

🐻 Lead Product Manager | California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation | up to $12k/month (closes June 12)

💻 Head of Product - Benefits Transformation | CoBEES (Colorado Benefits Eligibility & Enrollment Systems) |$140/hr (contract)

Emerging Tech

🍎 AI Project Lead | Kings County District Attorney’s Office | up to $140k (closes June 23)

🍎 AI Governance Lead | New York State Department of Health | up to $161k (closes June 10)

🍎 Director of AI Solutions | NYC Office of the Comptroller | up to $160k (closes July 19)

🐊 IT Architect (Responsible AI & Innovation) | City of Houston | up to $2.8k/wk (closes June 11)

🌵 AI Product Manager | Arizona Department of Environmental Quality | up to $135k

🐻 Strategic Technologies Lead | California Health and Human Services, Office of Technology and Solutions Integration | up to $13k/month

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍎 Senior Data Scientist | MTA | up to $134k

🦀 Data Scientist | U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP), Division of Financial Administration (DFA) | up to $187k (closes June 12)

🌽 Senior Data Scientist | Metropolitan Council | up to $144k (closes June 21)

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Software Engineering Manager, Research | New York Public Library | up to $155k

🔔 Principal Software Engineer | City of Philadelphia | up to $124k

💻 Engineering - Senior Tech Lead | Maryland Digital Service | up to $175k (closes August 31)

Executive Leadership

🍎 Chief Technology Officer | State of Delaware | up to $147k (closes June 29)

🍎 Chief Product Development Officer / Deputy Commissioner for Product Development | NYC Office of Technology and Innovation | up to $275k (closes July 10)

🦀 Chief of Performance Improvement & Innovation | State of Maryland | up to $163k

🐻 Chief Innovation Officer | City of San Jose | up to $216k

🐻 Chief AI Engineer | CA Office of Data and Innovation | up to $195k

Colorado Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

Rebecca Heywood — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 19:02:17 GMT

Colorado’s Office of Information Technology announced a major restructuring last week and said publicly exactly why it’s necessary. They acknowledged failures common in gov IT shops that we have been talking around for years. Colorado finally said enough is enough: they are committing to shifting how the state delivers services to match how Coloradans interact with government.

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While the restructuring came with 173 layoffs, it is hard to make drastic change in an organization when there is a major role mismatch. As and Kelly Taylor, who co-founded the Colorado Digital Service, wrote this week in : moving to a product model isn’t about doing the old thing better — “these are literally different jobs.” You can’t put a project manager into a product title and hope for the best. The skills, the instincts, and the measures of success are fundamentally different.

Government IT organizations fail constantly and visibly. What almost never happens is that they say so themselves, in public, before being forced to, and with enough specificity to be held accountable.

Colorado did that. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Opening slide from OIT’s new operating model: https://oit.colorado.gov/about-us

The Documents Themselves

Both the North Star document and the Operating Model are worth a read. They are clear, to the point, and acknowledge failure patterns present in nearly every government IT department.

Manual effort doing the work that tools should
Cost-recovery funding paper-pushing rather than delivery
Agencies routing around OIT because it wasn’t a useful partner
Governance built to prevent yesterday’s failures now preventing today’s delivery; and
Skilled agency teams treated as a problem rather than an asset.

These are not new problems - folks in the civic tech field have been naming these issues for years, but we rarely see teams themselves share them publicly and honestly. There are other departments doing similar work quietly, but what is unusual and important is that Colorado is working in the open.

Digital transformation in government is challenging, but the technology, while vital, is rarely the challenge. Building trust and a culture willing to take risks are the fundamental part of making change sustainable, and OIT’s theory of change explicitly acknowledges the need for credibility and trust before fixing structural problems that cut across departments, like the funding model and procurement vehicles.

Overall, OIT is moving from a project-based approach to a product-based approach. Colorado Digital Service has been working this way for years, but it is not how IT grew up in government.

Someone once told me that an IT organization is structured for the era when hardware was hard and software was easy, and that a digital organization is for when hardware is easy and software is hard. A recent FAS retrospective by Merici Vinton, who spearheaded the launch of the (now defunct) Direct File, on fifteen years of digital service work named this directly: all organizations are software organizations. Our IT organizations have lagged behind.

“In 2026, all organizations are software organizations”.

- Merici Vinton

Slide from CO OIT’s new operating model: what a product model is (and isn’t)

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This Almost Never Happens

Most government IT organizations fail in full public view and never acknowledge it in any meaningful, structural way. We have created an environment where if you fail in the “right way”, you can continue to throw millions of dollars at a problem and never achieve the outcomes you set out to achieve, but if you try something new, then failure is not an option. We have seen this in various ways across the country over the years:

Rhode Island’s Unified Health Infrastructure Project (UHIP), a Deloitte-built system meant to consolidate benefits delivery for Medicaid, SNAP, and other programs, launched in 2016 to catastrophic results. Hundreds of thousands of residents saw benefits cut off, delayed, or miscalculated, and the state’s auditor found the system paid approximately $11 million to 10,800 dead people. Total costs reached $682 million, the state settled with Deloitte for $50 million, and then awarded Deloitte a new $99 million contract to keep running it.
Between 2019 and 2025, California paid four technology companies over $450 million to build a Next Generation 911 system designed with a regionalized approach no other state had attempted. When the time came to turn the system on, it didn’t work. After disruptions emerged in a fraction of dispatch centers, the rollout was paused and Cal OES scrapped the regional design entirely, declaring it unworkable and proposing to start over, at an additional cost of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars.
The New York City Office of Technology & Innovation spent four years and $100 million on MyCity, a one-stop benefits portal that largely redirects users to pre-existing city websites that have been rebranded. OTI contracted with approximately 50 firms for work including project planning, design, development, and quality assurance, citing a lack of internal staff to do the work itself. A Comptroller’s audit found it was poorly managed from both a project management and contract oversight perspective, and OTI’s response was to request $81 million more.
San Francisco Unified School District spent more than $40 million on EMPowerSF, a payroll system built on SAP software, and entered its third school year with a backlog of 3,000 unresolved issues including nearly 1,000 employees receiving paychecks days late. SAP had already been linked to payroll failures at Los Angeles Unified, Los Angeles Community College District, Marin County, and the California State Controller’s Office, which settled with the company for $59 million, before San Francisco school officials chose it anyway. The district’s response was to hire additional consultants at a cost of over $15 million, and to keep the system running.

The pattern is consistent: technology procured correctly, contracts properly awarded, and outcomes still catastrophically bad. What’s missing isn’t better vendors or bigger budgets. It’s the internal conditions that make technology actually work: product ownership that defines what success looks like and holds vendors to it, technical staff who understand what vendors are promising and whether they’re delivering, and organizations that aren’t so siloed that nobody has a complete picture of whether the system is working for the people who have to use it.

The Approaches Being Tried

Colorado is taking a fundamentally different approach than we typically see in civic tech. Rather than procuring their way out of the problem, they’re building the internal conditions to make the work succeed, whether it’s built in-house or by a vendor.

The most common approach is additive: stand up a small digital service team alongside the existing IT organization and hope the culture spreads. We see this in nearly half of states and dozens of cities around the country. Some sit within IT shops, but they often sit elsewhere in the organization, taking on a subset of priority projects and handing the work back to IT once the project ships.

There are a handful of jurisdictions where we have seen new approaches take root. Pennsylvania chose elevation without disruption: in October 2025, Bry Pardoe moved directly from leading CODE PA, the commonwealth’s digital service team, into the CIO role, bringing human-centered design principles with her without a public reset or workforce reduction. It will be interesting to see how PA and CO compare in 12 or 18 months time.

Chicago created a new entity: Mayor Brandon Johnson stood up a new Department of Technology and Innovation in late 2023, explicitly framing it as “not a revival of an old technology shop — it’s a new rethinking of an approach.”

Colorado’s approach is the rarest: restructure the central IT organization itself, cut the roles built around the old model, hire for the new one, and publish a document explaining why.

Colorado is doing something none of these approaches attempt: making the IT organization itself the software organization. Pahlka and Taylor describe how six years of CDS work – changing job descriptions, building procurement muscle, accumulating evidence – made this restructuring thinkable. The same FAS retrospective put it plainly: ‘An operating model that relies on external fixes rather than internal competence will always be behind.’

Colorado is betting that OIT can stop being the organization that needs external fixes, and become the organization that builds the competency in the first place. Whether the civil service system will let them is the open question.

The Civil Service & Hiring Problem

There’s a structural reason this keeps happening that rarely gets named. In many jurisdictions, civil service classification systems don’t have job titles for “product manager” or “service designer.” Agencies often can’t hire those people as employees even when they want to because the job doesn’t formally exist. A Niskanen Center analysis by , published this month, puts it plainly: the government is classifying 21st-century work against mid-20th-century benchmarks, forcing managers to shoehorn data scientists into categories designed for file clerks.

To get around this, agencies contract the work out instead. And once they’ve contracted it out, they lose the internal capacity to manage contractors well. Poor contract management produces poor outcomes. Auditors find the poor outcomes. Agencies request more budget for more contractors. In the case of NYC OTI, 50 firms were contracted for work the agency stated it lacked staff to do itself. As Canadian researchers studying federal IT contracting put it: you cannot reform government through consultants. You need people on staff who are empowered and accountable.

The Colorado North Star document names this explicitly as a stop-doing item — “stop hiring generalist ‘IT’ roles for work that requires specialists”, noting that job classifications lumping product managers, designers, engineers, and analysts into a single IT bucket make it impossible to build the workforce the reset requires.

Colorado is betting it can break the cycle, but doing so requires a hiring system willing to create the job titles and pay the salaries to sustain it.

The Graveyard of Digital Service Teams

The harder question underneath Colorado’s bet is not whether they can build the new model; it’s whether they can sustain it.

Most digital service teams exist at the pleasure of a single executive. They are created when someone with political will is in office, are funded through discretionary budgets, and are gone when that person leaves. New Jersey’s Office of Innovation existed for seven years before Gov. Murphy, in his final weeks in office, signed legislation making it the first state in the nation to permanently enshrine a state innovation office into law, explicitly because he wanted to ensure the work continued “long after my time in office.”

created the Colorado Digital Service. His term ends this year. Colorado’s restructuring is, among other things, an attempt to make the work survive the next election. The bet is that if you rebuild the whole organization around a product delivery model, there’s nothing left to dissolve. There’s no separate team to cut, no innovation office to defund. The model either becomes how OIT works, or the organization reverts entirely.

Ontario built a genuine digital service organization over seven years, launching 30+ mission-based product teams. It was dissolved in a departmental reorganization in March 2024, having moved through five different ministry homes and been demoted two management levels until the mandate evaporated.

18F proved what was possible over 11 years and was eliminated by a late-night email when the administration changed.

Pahlka and Taylor name a subtler version of this failure: an effective digital service can provide just enough success to excuse the lack of true reform. When someone asks why IT systems are still failing, the answer becomes ‘well, we have the digital service,’ and the harder conversation moves on.

The pattern across every example is the same: digital service capacity gets built, proves something, and then fails to sustain, whether through absorption, elimination, neglect, or calcification.

The Verdict

Colorado named the quiet part out loud: the problem is not effort or people. It is a system designed for a different era.

The field has known this for a long time. What’s unusual is a government organization saying it about itself, in public, in a document it published and put its name on.

Whether the restructuring works is genuinely unknown. Sarah Tuneberg started her new role this week. Over 90 new roles to match the new way of working are still being filled, and the pod model has never been tested at this scale inside a central state IT organization.

Whatever happens, I know one thing: there will be a lot of lessons here for other teams.

The question isn’t just whether Colorado succeeds. It’s whether other jurisdictions are watching closely enough to act on what they learn and whether they’ll have the courage to do something this uncomfortable when their moment comes.

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This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs - May 21, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:28:48 GMT

📣 The full list of jobs is now at Tech Jobs for Gov, the newly launched companion job board to this newsletter. It’s now open to the whole civic tech ecosystem. If your organization is hiring — or you know one that is — the details are at techjobsforgov.com/post-a-job. Posting government jobs will always be free.

Reads

👏I got to spend a few days in Madrid at the GovTech 4 Impact World Congress, where government leaders from across Europe and Latin America were deep in conversation about digital transformation. A few things I’m still sitting with:

, the former Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan, offered a framing I keep coming back to: serve your “good-enough ancestor”, not the “perfect ancestor”. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.
Digital Public Infrastructure, the foundational systems that underpin modern digital government, is assumed to exist in Europe in a way it simply isn’t in the US yet. That gap shapes everything about how we approach what is possible.
“Sovereignty is a procurement decision”. That line got me thinking. Sovereignty is rarely a discussion in the US outside of tribal leaders, but the broader question of who builds the systems governments depend on and what values and culture are embedded in them, is one we are not talking about enough.
Trust in government isn’t just about outcomes. It’s also about trust in the process. True trust in government comes when government works and when it continues to deliver over time.
Government leaders are eager for more spaces to talk openly about failure. There aren’t enough of them.

What are you seeing from your side that echoes or diverges from this?

🔎 put together a comprehensive look at the federal General Schedule and classification system - what’s working, what isn’t and what reform can look like - plus a companion piece tracing the history of position classification back to 1789. The history of these systems shapes our reality today. The New York Times also published published an article earlier this week on the role HR and public employees play in authoritarian governments. How government hires isn’t just an administrative question, but a structural one tied deeply to power.

♿ The Department of Justice pushed back the deadline for WCAG 2.1 accessibility compliance for state and local governments just 4 days before the deadline. Governments across the country now have an extra year to meet this requirement. Bloom Works shared a guide for inaccessible PDFs and an open-source tool for bulk scanning PDFs. Department of Civic Things has an AI tool to help governments learn how to make their website compliant as well as other resources.

💰Larry Bafundo, the former Executive Director of the federal Technology Modernization Fund and former Director of Unemployment Insurance Modernization at USDOL under Biden, has a new report about the legacy IT trap in the federal government and the role TMF has been able to play in enabling multi-year modernization work that the standard appropriations process cannot support. Worth reading as TMF’s long-term future remains unclear and governments across the country grapple with similar questions.

🛒 Partners for Public Good, the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) and the American Bar Association (ABA) are collaborating on The Model Procurement Code Revision Project. The Model Procurement Code was first developed in the 1970s but public procurement has shifted significantly since then. The MPC has been the basis for public procurement laws around the country since 1979, and it is due for an update. Definitely worth following closely

🖱️Pennsylvania’s CIO (and former executive director of CODE PA), Bry Pardoe, talked at NASCIO and with Government Technology about how her experience leading a digital service team is influencing her approach to the commonwealth’s IT projects.

🏫 One of the big wins at the federal level right now is the rebuild and redesign of FAFSA. The redesign of FAFSA started with the FUTURE Act in 2019 and the FAFSA Simplification Act in 2020, but the headline story was serious delays to the release of the FAFSA form in 2023 and 2024 that disrupted college application season. After working with USDS and creating its own internal digital team, students can now complete the form in under 15 minutes. Eddy Conroy shared more about this evolution on Can We Still Govern?

🧑‍⚖️Government operations aren’t just shaped by laws created by state legislatures or city councils. Litigation and court cases create court orders that regularly impact how agencies are expected to operate and deliver services. In NYC, put together a database of the consent decrees that impact New York City agencies. It’s an important insight into the complexity of how government works and what constrains operations.

Events

📈Washington, DC: The Data Foundation is hosting the 2026 Data Summit on June 4. The event will focus on the role of public data in decision-making across American Society. Learn more and register here.

🔍Virtual: Join Seattle University School of Law for a free virtual event exploring Indigenous Perspectives on AI: Appropriation, Regulation and Innovation on Friday, June 5. Register here.

💼Virtual: InnovateUS and U.S. Digital Response are running their last session in their spring series on UX in city services. Join on Thursday, May 21 for a session on Hiring for UX Roles and Building Agency UX Practices. Register here.

📚Atlanta: Civic Tech Atlanta is hosting a book club on Friday, May 29 at 8:30am to discuss the first half of Recoding America. Join to talk about all things civic tech. Register here.

🦮NYC and Virtual: Jesse Gardner is joining the A11yNYC meetup on Tuesday, June 2, to share about his work leading the Design System and Accessibility teams for New York State. Register here.

🍩Los Angeles: Join Data + Donuts for their Spring Happy Hour on Thursday, May 21 in Los Angeles. Register here.

🎉Oakland: Rebekah Otto and Anita Cheng are hosting a civic tech happy hour in Oakland, CA on Tuesday, May 26. Register here.

Highlighted Teams and Roles

🏥 The State of Colorado’s Colorado Benefits Eligibility and Enrollment Systems (CoBEES) program is recruiting contractors to help rebuild the benefits management system behind Medicaid, SNAP, TANF, CCAP, and CHP+ — one of the largest human services modernizations in the country. There are roles open across product, UX, engineering, and program ops to support this multi-year initiative through 2029. Contractors may work remotely within the U.S., with occasional travel to CO.

🙈 Join the only dedicated state privacy regulator in the US. The DROP team is building a first-of-its-kind platform to allow Californians to delete their data from data brokers. They are looking for a candidate for the DROP Support Manager role passionate about customer success to join our small but mighty team.

🍎 New York City is continuing to build its agency teams to deliver on the Mamdani administration’s priorities. There are executive leadership positions open at agencies across the city including Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Product Development Officer, CISO and Deputy Commissioner for Agency Shared Services at the NYC Office of Technology & Innovation.

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Select Open Roles

There are over 140 jobs listed right now at techjobsforgov.com and changing every day. The newsletter will include a selection of roles currently open.

UX, Design and Innovation

🍎 Associate Director of Product Design | NYC Campaign Finance Board | up to $160k

🍎 Digital Communications Manager | New York City Department of Veteran’s Services | up to $74k (closes June 1)

🐊 Director of Innovation | Harris County Precinct 4 | (closes June 5)

🐊 UX / Product Designer | South Carolina Department of Education | up to $80k (closes June 1)

Product & Program Management

🍀 Director of IT Product Strategy & Portfolio | Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Development | up to $170k

🍎 Associate Director, IT Products & Business Relations | New York Public Library | up to $160k

🍎 Product Digital Services Manager | New York State Digital Service | up to $121k (closes May 29)

🍎 Product Principal | NYC Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement | up to $150k

🤝 🍎 Forward-Deployed Product Manager | Concourse Tech | up to $200k

🔔 Director - Enterprise Product Management | City of Philadelphia | up to $165k

🌽 Early Childhood Administration Product Group Manager | State of Minnesota | up to $137k (closes May 22)

🌦️ Senior Product Manager - ORCA | Sound Transit | up to $211k

💻 Product Manager | New Jersey Innovation Authority | up to $145k

💻 Head of Product - Benefits Transformation | CoBEES (Colorado Benefits Eligibility & Enrollment Systems) | $150/hr (contract)

Emerging Tech

🐻 Head of Emerging Technologies | California Department of Technology | up to $14k (closes May 21)

💻 AI Product Manager | Arizona Department of Environmental Quality | up to $135k

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍀 Data Engineer | MBTA | $116k (closes May 28)

🍎 CitiStat Director | City of Jersey City | up to $110k

🍎 Senior Director - Data Operations, Systems, and Analytics (DOSA) | NYC Department of Transportation | up to $202k (closes May 25)

🦀 BCSTAT Senior Data Analyst | Baltimore County, MD | up to $50.16/hr (closes May 27)

🌵Enterprise Data & AI Platform Architect | Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System | up to $105k

🐻 Data Analyst (Housing and Homelessness Reporting) | City of Oakland | up to $144k (closes May 22)

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Senior Software Engineer | Manhattan DA’s Office | up to $150k (closes June 15)

🍎 Quality Assurance Engineer | New York Public Library | up to $120k (closes May 21)

🔔 Software Engineer, Mobile Development (Android) | City of Philadelphia | up to $80k

🦀 Distinguished Architect [Data & Intelligence] | Amtrak | up to $232k

🐊 Director of Infrastructure and Cloud Services | South Carolina Department of Education | up to $155k (closes May 21)

🌽 Principal Engineer (Job Number: 416799) | City of Chicago | up to $109k (closes June 1)

🌦️ Enterprise Architect | Sound Transit | up to $201k

🐻 Senior Full Stack Engineer | CA Office of Data and Innovation | up to $153k (closes May 26)

💻 Frontend Lead Developer | CoBEES (Colorado Benefits Eligibility & Enrollment Systems) | $140/hr (contract)

💻 Backend Lead | CoBEES (Colorado Benefits Eligibility and Enrollment Systems) | $140/hr (contract)

💻 Full-Stack Lead Developer | CoBEES (Colorado Benefits Eligibility and Enrollment Systems) | $140/hr (contract)

Executive Leadership

🍎 Chief Analytics Officer/Deputy Commissioner, Data Analytics | New York City Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $270k (closes May 25)

🍎 Deputy Commissioner and Chief Information Security Officer | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $270k (closes June 13)

🍎 Deputy Commissioner, Agency Shared Services, Strategy and Advisory Group | New York City Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $275k (closes May 26)

🍎 Chief Product Development Officer / Deputy Commissioner for Product Development | NYC Office of Technology and Innovation | up to $275k (closes July 10)

🔔 Chief Creative Strategy Officer (CSO) | City of Philadelphia | up to $175k

🦀 Director of Digital Strategy | U.S. Department of Commerce, International Trade Administration | up to $197k (closes May 21)

🐊 Manager, Data Platforms, Engineering & Operations | MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) | 🤷

🐻 Chief GenAI Engineer | California Office of Data and Innovation | up to $195k

🐻 Deputy Director and Chief Data Officer | California Department of Health Care Access and Information | up to $14k/month (closes May 25)

🐻 Chief, Division of Data and Digital Services | Caltrans | up to $14k (closes June 3)

Accessibility

🍎 Accessibility Navigator Manager | New York State Digital Service | up to $118k (closes May 22)

🌽 Digital Accessibility Specialist | City of Chicago | starts at $109k (closes May 29)

🌦️ IT Digital Accessibility Specialist - Senior | Washington School for the Blind | up to $125k

Internships & Fellowships

🍎 Digital Transformation Intern | New Jersey Department of Community Affairs | up to $30/hr

🦀 Digital Services Engineering Intern | City of Baltimore | up to $15/hr (closes July 10)

💻 Data & Policy Graduate Fellow - AI Policy & Public Projects | New Jersey Innovation Authority | up to $30/hr

💻 Generative AI Graduate Fellow - Technical Research and Development | New Jersey State Office of Innovation | up to $30/hr

This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs - May 6, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:02:57 GMT

Announcements

📣Big news: You can now see government tech and innovation jobs at any time my newly launched job board, Tech Jobs for Gov, and it is now open to the whole civic tech ecosystem.

Two things that have been on my mind for a while are now ready, and I wanted to share both at once.

The job board is live. Tech Jobs for Gov (techjobsforgov.com) is a hand-curated job board built specifically for this community. Job searching doesn’t always follow a newsletter schedule - roles open when they open, and people look when they are looking. The job board is always on, updated regularly, and has more listings than will ever fit in a single edition. The core ethos of the #PublicSectorJobBoard remains: every listing is reviewed for mission-alignment before it goes up and government job posts are always free. I’ve also expanded the automation pipeline, so you’re now seeing jobs from more state and local governments and other governmental entities like transit agencies and libraries from all over the country.

Civic tech organizations can now post jobs. Building a government that works better for people isn’t just work that happens inside government — it happens in the nonprofits, public benefit corporations, GovTech startups, academic institutions and other organizations that support it. This has been on my mind for a while, and starting this week, mission-aligned civic tech organizations can post roles alongside government listings.

The timing is deliberate. I recently launched Civic Works Studio as an independent practice — and this job board and newsletter are at the center of it. Paid listings from civic tech orgs are what make it possible to keep government listings free and keep this work going. If you’ve found value in this newsletter, supporting the organizations that advertise roles here is one way to help sustain it.

We already have our first listings up from civic tech partners this week. 🎉

If your organization is hiring — or you know one that is — the details are at techjobsforgov.com/post-a-job.

Subscribe to keep getting job listings, news, and analysis from across the civic tech world — and make sure you don’t miss roles that don’t make it into the newsletter.

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Reads

♿Digital accessibility has been a popular topic this week and for good reason. Ericca Rowe, from Digital Services Georgia, wrote about how witnessing her mother’s experience after a stroke has impacted how she views technology and her career path. Colorado shared their Digital Accessibility Workshop, an asynchronous virtual lab designed to build awareness, empathy and desire to create accessible and equitable digital products. It’s a free, publicly-available resource that’s a great starting point for teams interested in strengthening their digital accessibility practices.

👩🏽‍🎓If you’re hearing about digital service teams but still not quite sure what they are or how they different from other teams in government, check out the Beeck Center’s new Digital Service Teams 101 report. While it’s designed as a resource for state and local government class considering building out a team, it provides a great overview for technologists thinking about joining one.

🧑‍💻The office of personnel management announced USA Class, an AI-powered tool to automate the creation of position descriptions. PDs are common across government and basically a job description on steroids written in a very specific way in government language. While on the surface helping hiring managers with a notoriously annoying process, it does raise the question of the value of the current approach and what steps could or should be taken to make it less burdensome while continuing to fulfill its initial goals. It is vital that hiring managers can articulate the value of the role but at the same time, it will depend on whether it now means that folks can focus on the substance instead of following a bureaucratic process. A former colleague, Michael Boyce, wrote in more detail about the opportunity and potential pitfalls.

⚡I’ll admit I’m still learning about AI agents and the implications but recently saw Tom Loosemore’s piece (thanks Alicia Rouault) noting that government isn’t prepared for the wave of individuals using their own AI agents to access public services, appeal decisions and more. Mark Headd also has an interesting piece on how people are already delegating government service interactions and how it can inform how we design our services.

🛂While some government digital services from the last administration didn’t survive into this one (RIP Direct File), one that has been kept around is online passport renewals. The State Department has processed over 7 million renewals through this system with a staggering 94% satisfaction rate. Read more about the program’s success and what we might be able to expect in the future in Natalie Alm’s new article.

📝I loved Vital City and Cara Eckholm’s new interview with Yunive Moreno from Guadalajara about their efforts to digitize commercial permits alongside the City of Guadalajara and the State of Jalisco. The impacts on licensing time, bribe solicitation and use of third-party intermediaries is staggering.

Events

🤝Chicago: The Code for America Summit is happening this week and there are lots of events open to attendees and folks local to the Chicago area:

Federation of American Scientists is hosting a coffee Friday morning to share what they’ve heard from their Digital Service Retros work, looking at what the next era of digital services can look like. It’s waitlist only right now, but they’re expecting to let folks know if space becomes available. Sign up here.
The Institute for Responsive Government and U.S. Digital Response are hosting a Democracy that Delivers Happy Hour on Thursday. RSVP here.
Know of others? Share in the comments.

🗽New York: The Service Design Studio at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Economic Opportunity is hosting a Civic Design Forum on June 4 (unfortunately only open to NYC employees) for a hands-on design sprint using data from The People’s Money, New York’s participatory budgeting initiative. Learn about the design sprint toolkit while uncovering actionable insights for agencies.

Highlighted Teams and Roles

📚The Texas Education Agency is looking for a senior technical and product leader to define the strategy and delivery of enterprise data platforms supporting statewide education initiatives. This role leads a multidisciplinary team building scalable, secure, user‑centered data systems—including the Program Area Data Lake and supporting the use of Texas Education Exchange. Check out more details here.

🗳️The New York City Campaign Finance Board is hiring a Product Design leader to lean the design vision for digital products and public-facing services, and help translate this vision into real actionable product experiences.

🤖The California Department of Technology is hiring for an exciting leadership role in emerging technologies. The Head of Emerging Technologies will provide leadership for emerging technology efforts across the department including the implementation of AI safety legislation, and advancement of statewide Artificial Intelligence (AI) governance, policy, strategy, and adoption. Other initiatives may include research on Frontier AI developments, AI oversight, risk management, and emerging technology evaluation, ensuring statewide alignment with statutory requirements and responsible technology use.

👧The Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families is hiring a Product Group Manager for their Early Childhood Administration. You’ll be a senior product and people leader responsible for the supervision and coaching of 5-9 product managers, as well as developing and supporting the strategic direction and delivery of a portfolio of digital products within the department. Your work will impact for thousands of families, providers, partner organizations, and other members of the public in Minnesota who engage with the programs and services of the Early Childhood Administration. You’ll also play a key role in forming a true product organization within DCYF.

Open Roles

A note: you’ll see a new symbol on the board. 🤝indicates that the role is a paid posting from a civic tech partner organization that works with governments.

UX, Design and Innovation

🍀 Director, UX Research and Design | MBTA | up to $170k (closes May 7)

🍎 Associate Director of Product Design | NYC Campaign Finance Board | up to $160k (closes June 13)

🍎 Digital Communications Manager | New York City Department of Veteran’s Services | up to $74k (closes June 1)

🏔️ Rural Health Transformation Program Tech Innovation Policy Advisor | Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing | up to $93k (closes May 11)

🐻 UX Designer | California Office of Data and Innovation | up to $153k (closes May 12)

🐻 Digital Content Manager | California State Water Resources Control Board | up to $9k/month (closes May 15)

Product & Program Management

🌲Portfolio Manager | Vermont Digital Services Agency | up to $66.57/hr (closes May 17)

🍎 Product Principal | NYC Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement | up to $150k (closes June 29)

🦀 Enterprise Data Program Manager | Maryland Department of Information Technology | up to $131k (closes May 6)

🦀 Technical Product Manager (Contract) | Maryland Department of General Service | 🤷 (closes May 7)

🌽 Early Childhood Administration Product Group Manager | State of Minnesota | up to $137k (closes May 22)

🤝💻 Assistant Director, Technology Delivery | Partners for Public Good | $139k (closes May 17)

🤝💻 Associate, Technology | Partners for Public Good | $103k (closes May 17)

Emerging Tech

🐻 Head of Emerging Technologies | California Department of Technology | up to $14k/month (closes May 21)

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍎 Data Scientist | NYC Housing Authority | up to $110k (closes May 9)

🍎 Data Scientist | NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission | $88k (closes June 28)

🐊 Property Tax Data Analyst | Harris County | up to $75k (closes June 30)

🐊 Director of Program Data Systems | Texas Education Agency | up to $9k/month (closes May 12)

🐊 PMO Data Analyst | Harris County | 🤷(closes May 11)

🐻 Associate Data Visualization Engineer | CA Department of Toxic Substances Control | up to $9k/month (closes May 6)

🐻 Senior Data and Analytics Engineer | CA Department of Public Health | up to $12k/month (closes May 13)

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Senior Software Engineer | Manhattan DA’s Office | up to $150k (closes June 15)

🤝🍎 Forward-Deployed Product Manager | Concourse Tech | up to $200k

🦀 Google Platform Architect | Maryland Department of Information Technology | 🤷 (closes May 8)

🐊 Cloud Engineer | Georgia Department of Driver Services | up to $110k (closes May 8)

🌽 Lead Software Engineer | City of Oklahoma City | 🤷 (closes May 7)

🌦️ Senior Software Developer - Azure | Washington Courts | up to $123k (closes May 15)

🐻 Senior Software Developer - Mainframe* | San Bernardino County | up to $135k (closes May 8)

🐻 Solutions Architect | City and County of San Francisco, Department of Technology | 🤷 (closes May 18)

Executive Leadership

🍎 Deputy Commissioner and Chief Information Security Officer | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $270k (closes June 13)

🍎 Executive Director, Technology Strategy | NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission | up to $180k (closes June 28)

🦀 Associate Commissioner for Technology & Survey Processing | U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics | up to $228k (closes May 6)

🌽 Chief Information Officer (Information Services Agency) | City of Indianapolis | up to $115k (closes May 29)

🌦️ Chief Information Officer | State of Washington | up to $152k (closes May 6)

🐻 Assistant Division Chief/Program Manager, Digital Transformation | CA Department of Motor Vehicles | up to $12k/month (closes May 6)

Internships & Fellowships

🦀 IT Portfolio & Operations Analyst Intern | City of Baltimore | $21/hr (closes July 15)

🐻 Software Engineer Intern - AI | Orange County Employees Retirement System | $40k (closes May 10)

This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs - Apr 23, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:45:54 GMT

📢 The #PublicSectorJobBoard provides you with a regular digest of US-based government news, resources & jobs in #tech and #innovation.

🗣 Hiring in government? Hosting a civic tech event? Share your open role for the next edition of the job board.

Announcements & Reads

🔥 More changes are coming to the job board! Keep your eye out in coming weeks for some exciting updates about the #PublicSectorJobBoard based on your feedback.

💼 I sat down with from , a long-time friend and colleague, to talk about why fixing government hiring matters. Jen writes on infrastructure and the hidden networks that affect our lives, so we sat down to connect the dots on how these hidden, back-office processes affect the day-to-day of everyone in cities and what we can do about it. Take a look.

🚌 Kristin Taylor dove into how the different results from trip planner apps break down rider trust and what needs to be done about it. The issue she frames is a common one: “The problem is we’ve optimized for product outcomes (app downloads, feature usage, prediction accuracy) without designing for the rider outcome: completing the entire trip planning job successfully.”

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 Transform Wales recently reshared their recommendations for the next Welsh government entitled Transforming Public Services for a Modern Wales. The report is worth a read. The challenges we face aren’t unique to the US or North America. Check it out here.

“We keep the same people in positions of power, closing the door to new talent in leadership. We use the same approaches to designing and delivering services, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It’s time to break the cycle of crisis management. We need to plan for the long term. That means rethinking how government works – not just what it delivers, but how.”

📍 Jeremie Ponak and built a map of the State Capacity Ecosystem in an effort to build out a shared directory of civic tech orgs and a landscape overview for newcomers to the field. They are building an iterative map - learn more and contribute to it here.

The State Capacity Ecosystem Map from Jeremie and Henry

👷 is publishing a series of findings and frameworks from their HR1 toolkit. The team has been working with state and local governments on how to implement the new HR1 Medicaid work requirements and SNAP PER reduction in ways that preserve coverage. Follow along here.

💰As tax day came and went, wrote about the death of Direct Fire, and what insights it gives us about state capacity. Take a look at his deep dive into what happened from interviews with folks who worked on the project, and musings on what this means for digital services and our ability to “have nice things”.

🐶 Merici Vinton wrote a love letter to Direct File, pulling the many social media reactions to its death and what it means for government to deliver.

Events

🏛️ DC: All Tech is Human is hosting a Responsible Tech Mixer on Monday, April 27 from 5:30-7:30pm in DC. Register here.

💳 Virtual: Interested in benefits delivery, eligibility policy or state health and human services? Join on May 5 to learn about U.S. Digital Response’s work with three state partners to reduce SNAP payment error rates. Register here.

🔉New York City: Register to attend the NYC Pitchfest, hosted by Pilot City on May 21. Pitchfest: New York City is an annual event designed to connect New York City government agency staff, university faculty, and civic fellows. Agencies will give pitches on short-term, high impact projects that could benefit from external expert support. After the event, the Pitchfest team matches agencies with local experts with potential philanthropic funding available to teams. Learn more and register here.

Highlighted Roles

🗳️The NYC Campaign Finance Board is hiring an Associate Director of Product Design for their newest division, Strategy, Products, and Innovation. The team leads strategic planning and policy work across the agency, testing and implementing new ideas. They also own the agency’s product roadmap, creating and maintaining tools that make it easier for New Yorkers to vote, support candidates for city office and run for office themselves. The Associate Director is a senior design leader responsible for driving the execution of user-centered design across digital products and public-facing services.

🧪 The Lab @ DC is hiring an Associate Director of Design to lead The Lab’s efforts to make government services work for residents and operates from a resident-centered perspective. The Associate Director will oversee the team’s Social Science and Data Science teams and manage the design, implementation and analysis of policy and program evaluations, while supporting DC Government agencies recognize their own power to ensure equitable outcomes for all Washingtonians.

🤖 Oregon Metro is hiring an AI Automation Specialist to drive the transformation of AI-powered automation and intelligent workflows for their staff and the Greater Portland community. You’ll design, build, and deploy AI-driven automations that transform how Metro departments serve the community, contributing significantly to Metro’s digital evolution. You’ll bring expertise in agentic AI systems and workflow automation to turn manual bottlenecks into intelligent, autonomous processes—allowing staff to focus on high-touch public service.

📋 The City and County of San Francisco are hiring a Technical Product & Platform Lead for PermitSF, a citywide effort to modernize and streamline permitting processes across multiple departments to improve customer experience. You’ll be responsible for defining and governing system architecture, data models and integration across legacy systems, cloud platforms and department applications. You will ultimately serve as the primary technical authority on the implementation of a COTS permitting platform within a complex environment.

Open Roles

UX, Design and Innovation

🍎 Associate Director of Product Design | NYC Campaign Finance Board | up to $160k (closes June 13)

🦀 Associate Director of Design (Job ID 32200) | Lab @ DC | up to $160k (closes April 24)

🐊 User Experience Data Scientist | City of El Paso | up to $138k (closes April 28)

Product & Program Management

🍀 Senior Technical Project Manager | MBTA | starts at $151k (closes April 24)

🐊 Technical Product Analyst (Information Systems/Business Analyst III) - 61150787 | State of South Carolina | up to $120k (closes April 29)

🐊 Digital Foundations Manager | NC Department of Health and Human Services | up to $160k (closes April 28)

🌽 Information Technology Manager-14 Enterprise Information, Identity and Access Management | State of Michigan | up to $114k (closes April 28)

🏔️ Digital Service Expert (Procurement and Contracts Strategist) | Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology | $130k (closes May 5)

🐻 Portfolio Manager | CA Office of Data and Innovation | up to $166k (closes April 30)

Emerging Tech

🍎 Artificial Intelligence Manager | State of Connecticut | up to $157k (closes April 24)

🐊 AI Training Specialist (GTA) | State of Georgia | up to $84k (closes April 24)

🌦️ AI Automation Specialist | Oregon Metro’s Technology Department | up to $123k (closes May 5)

🐻 Generative AI Senior Application Engineer | CA Public Employees Retirement System | up to $12k (closes April 27)

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍎 Data Scientist | NYC Housing Authority | up to $110k (closes May 9)

🦀 Data Scientist | Washington DC Government | up to $142k (closes April 28)

🐊 I&T Data Analytics Specialist Senior | City of Charlotte, Innovation and Technology Department | up to $104k (closes April 27)

🐊 Senior IT Data Analyst | Austin Financial Services | up to $102k (closes May 4)

🐊 Business Analyst & Technical Writer | State of South Carolina | up to $89k (closes April 29)

🐊 Property Tax Data Analyst | Harris County | up to $75k (closes June 30)

🌦️ Data Office Manager | Oregon Health Authority | up to $13k/month (closes April 29)

🌦️ Transportation Electrification Data Analyst | City of Seattle | up to $115k (closes April 28)

🐻 Principal Data Architect | CA Office of Data and Innovation | up to $173k (closes April 29)

🐻 Associate Data Visualization Engineer | CA Department of Toxic Substances Control | up to $9k/month (closes May 6)

🐻 Senior Data and Analytics Engineer | CA Department of Public Health | up to $12k/month (closes May 13)

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Senior DevOps Cloud Engineer | State of Connecticut | up to $155k (closes April 27)

🍎 Senior Software Engineer | Manhattan DA’s Office | up to $150k (closes June 15)

🍎 Technology Analyst 2 (Rapid Application Development) | NYS Office of Information Technology Services | up to $121k (closes May 2)

🍎 Director of Technology Risk and Assessment | NYC Housing Authority | up to $185k (closes April 23)

🐊 Cloud Engineer | Georgia Department of Driver Services | up to $110k (closes May 8)

🐊 Software Developer Lead | Charlotte Area Transit System | up to $133k (closes May 5)

🌽 Cybersecurity Training & Outreach Specialist | State of Iowa | up to $122k (closes May 11)

🏔️ Bioinformatics Cloud Engineer | State of Colorado | up to $84k (closes May 3)

🌦️ Cloud Platform Enablement Architect | State of Washington | up to $138k (closes May 3)

🐻 Developer | CA Department of Child Support Services | up to $11k/month (closes May 2)

🐻 Cloud Engineer Lead | CA Department of Social Services | up to $13k/month (closes April 27)

🐻 Technical Project Lead | City and County of San Francisco | up to $196k (closes April 30)

Executive Leadership

🍎 Deputy State Court Administrator - Chief Information Officer | State of Delaware | up to $98k (closes May 4)

🍎 Executive Director, Information Technology (IT) Solutions Delivery | NYC Department of Buildings | up to $183k (closes May 4)

🍎 Deputy Commissioner and Chief Information Security Officer | NYC Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $270k (closes June 13)

🐊 Deputy Director - CIO | State of South Carolina | up to $193k (closes April 24)

🌽 Executive Technology Officer | State of Iowa | up to $194k (closes April 23)

🌵 Chief Technology & Innovation Officer | Maricopa County | up to $203k (closes April 26)

🐻 Chief Information Officer, Technology Services Division | CA Department of Tax and Fee Administration | up to $14k/month (closes April 23)

Accessibility

🐊 Digital Accessibility Coordinator | NC Department of Public Instruction | up to $89k (closes April 24)

Internships & Fellowships

🏔️ Artificial Intelligence (AI) Fellow | State of Colorado | $22/hr (closes May 1)

🐊 DCP Intern - Business Operations | City of Atlanta | $17.50/hr (closes April 28)

🦀 IT Portfolio & Operations Analyst Intern | City of Baltimore | $15/hr (closes July 15)

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This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs - Apr 9, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:35:51 GMT

📢 The #PublicSectorJobBoard provides you with a regular digest of US-based government news, resources & jobs in #tech and #innovation.

🗣 Hiring in government? Hosting a civic tech event? Share your open role or event for the next edition of the job board.

Announcements & Reads

🏥 Last week’s episode of The Pitt on HBO highlighted the issue of ‘procedural denials’ in Medicaid coverage through the story of a teenager who lost their coverage and despite their mother’s best efforts to get it reinstated, ended up in the ER. Ex parte has been a common theme in civic tech spaces over the last several years as teams in and out of government work together to make the renewal process easier on clients by building systems that can automate renewals, reduce casework burden and help ensure that stories like this don’t happen. Code for America highlighted the work their ex parte team has done on this issue, and Alicia Rouault, a former HHS CTO and former USDS staff member, wrote about what can actually be done to fix it.

🤖 When is AI the right thing to use to solve government problems? Erie Meyer, the first employee of U.S. Digital Service, shared her thoughts this week in Fedscoop in an article entitled When philanthropy mandates AI solutions, taxpayers pay the price. The role of philanthropy in civic tech and government service delivery is growing, but Erie shares her perspective on the outsized role AI has played in the ability of civic organizations to access philanthropic funding. Read more here.

💸 Mayor Mamdani of New York City created Chief Savings Officer roles at every agency across NYC in order to identify savings to help balance the city’s books. The savings plans were announced March 20 with a total identified savings of $1.7B. of did a deep dive into what was identified and by which agencies to try and answer the question of will it be enough. Take a look.

❣️ Arianne Miller, the Managing Director of the Civic Design Collaborative and former Managing Director of the Lab at OPM, joined the Technical Difficulties podcast to talk about her journey in public service and helping civic organizations adopt human-centered design practices. What particularly stands out from the conversation is the focus on kindness, rest and recovery. Listen here.

📋 Maryland Digital Service is looking for folks who have recently applied for unemployment insurance benefits in Maryland or have made contributions as an employer to participate in interviews and usability testing. You can learn more and reach out to Emily Ianacone here.

✈️ Technical debt isn’t just something in software or IT. A recent article highlighted a common issue in government procurement - a government agency cannot fix their own equipment because of contracts. Task & Purpose, an online military news source, recently published an article entitled Right to repair: Why the US military can’t fix much of its own equipment. We see this issue with restrictive contracts regularly in government tech when a vendor is brought back into fix its own mistakes or has maintenance contracts in perpetuity because the government may not actually own its own code.

Events

💡 Virtual: Join the General Services Administration (GSA) on Thursday for a virtual info session on technology careers at the Technology Transformation Services. Learn about both organizations, how to navigate the federal hiring process and the type of work you may do. Thurs. April 9: 3-4pm. Register here.

🚌 Los Angeles: Join Data + Donuts on April 22 for a talk on Using Universal Basic Mobility Principles to Evolve How We Define, Measure, and Deliver Transportation Equity in Los Angeles with staff from LADOT. Register here.

🔉NYC: Register to attend the NYC Pitchfest, hosted by Pilot City on May 21. Pitchfest: New York City is an annual event designed to connect New York City government agency staff, university faculty, and civic fellows. Agencies will give pitches on short-term, high impact projects that could benefit from external expert support. After the event, the Pitchfest team matches agencies with local experts with potential philanthropic funding available to teams. Learn more and register here.

📅 NYC: Commonweal Ventures is hosting a GovTech Happy Hour in NYC on Tuesday, April 14. Register here.

🧑‍🍼 Virtual: Join InnovateUS on April 13 for a new webinar on The Identity Challenge: Tackling User Disambiguation and Data Integration Across Programs. Hear from experts about one of the most persistent challenges in human services: accurately identifying and serving individuals across multiple programs. Register here.

♿ Virtual: A11yJam is taking place virtually on Wednesday, April 15. Hosted by the Beeck Center, join the people on the front lines of digital accessibility just weeks before the April 2026 deadline for state and local governments to ensure their web content and mobile apps meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. Register here.

Virtual: Join InnovateUS on April 20 to learn about how states are using AI right now to stabilize Medicaid and SNAP at a moment marked by eligibility backlogs, procedural disenrollments, high error rates, staffing shortages, and declining public trust. Hear from state officials and other experts in a new session titled Innovations in Action: Inspiring projects from around the country. Register here.

Highlighted Roles

🤖 New York’s Chief AI Officer is recruiting for a key member of her team: the Director of AI and Data Governance. This new policy position will take the lead on the evolving state of AI governance in NY. Preference for candidates based in NYC. Learn more here.

🍎 Summer internship opportunities for New York City are live. You can view open positions here.

🔎 The Minnesota Department of Human Services is hiring a Digital Services Manager in the Office of the Inspector General. Join a multidisciplinary product organization delivering human-centered digital services that improve program integrity, enhance provider and partner experiences and are committed to advancing equitable access to services for Minnesotans. You’ll be a senior product and people leader responsible for setting the strategic direction and delivery of a portfolio of digital products.

🚆 Amtrak is hiring for a number of positions across their product and data teams including product owner, agile coach, data and AI engineer and more. Many of their positions can be based in a variety of Amtrak offices across the country. Join the teams leading Amtrak’s digital transformation.

🦀 The Maryland Digital Service is hiring an Engineering - Senior Tech Lead. As part of a dedicated MDDS Deployed Team, the Tech Lead will partner closely with a Product Manager and a UX Designer to form the core leadership trio responsible for delivery. The Tech Lead serves as the senior-most engineering expert embedded within a major state agency’s technology initiative. This role is accountable for defining and executing the technical strategy of a high-impact product or system central to agency operations while leading by example and building capacity in agency teams. Apply through MDDS’ general application here.

Open Roles

UX, Design and Innovation

🦀 Policy Analyst (Civic Design) | DC Department of Human Services | up to $119k (closes 4/11)

🐊 Web & Graphic Design Specialist | City of Savannah | $63k (closes 4/12)

🐊 Civic Designer | City of Chattanooga, Innovation Team | up to $110k

🐊 i-team Director | City of Jackson, Innovation Team | up to $204k

🏔️ Design and Evidence Analyst | Colorado Department of Human Services | up to $93k (closes 4/17)

Product and Program Management

🍀 Technical Project Manager | MBTA | up to $125k (closes 4/13)

🍎 Policy Analyst for Technology & Innovation | New York City Mayor’s Office | up to $125k

🍎 Director of System Integration | New York City Department of Youth and Community Development | up to $160k

🍎 Technology Analyst 1 (Product Management) | New York State Office of Information Technology Services | up to $109k (closes 4/17)

🍎 Director of Digital Infrastructure Procurement | State University of New York | up to $185k

🦀 Product Development Lead, Service Design & Technology | Amtrak | up to $122k

🌽 Digital Services Manager | Minnesota Department of Human Services, Office of Inspector General | up to $137k (closes 4/17)

🏔️ Digital Asset Program Manager | Colorado Department of Natural Resources, Energy & Carbon Management Commission | up to $100k (closes 4/12; CO residency required to apply; remote within CO)

🏔️ Director of the Office of eHealth Innovation | Colorado Office of the Lieutenant Governor | up to $120k (closes 4/20)

🌦️ IT Business Analyst | Washington State Department of Revenue | up to $109k (closes 4/12)

🌦️ Senior Technical Project Manager | Sound Transit | up to $191k

🐻 Innovation Program Manager | California Office of Data & Innovation | up to $117k (closes 4/9)

🇺🇲 Principal Digital Product Owner | Amtrak | up to $146k

🇺🇲 Sr Specialist, Digital Agility Coach | Amtrak | up to $101k

Emerging Tech

🍎 Director of Data & Artificial Intelligence Governance | New York State Office of Information Technology Services | up to $160k (closes 4/15)

🦀 Policy Analyst (Data and AI Governance) | DC Department of Human Services | up to $119k (closes 4/11)

🐻 Artificial Intelligence Officer | City of Palm Desert, CA | up to $148k

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍀 Senior Data Scientist | Boston Region MPO | up to $100k

🍎 Director of Business Analysis | NYC Office of Technology and Innovation | up to $140k

🍎 Senior Data Scientist | NYC Department of Design and Construction | up to $111k (closes 4/20)

🔔 Deputy Administrator – Data and Data Analytics | Montgomery County, PA | up to $108k (closes 4/21)

🔔 Business Intelligence Section Chief | Pennsylvania Department of Human Services | up to $117k (closes 4/17)

🦀 Data Scientist | Amtrak | up to $160k

🌽 Business Intelligence (BI) Developer | Metropolitan Council | up to $143k (closes 4/16)

🏔️ Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Manager | Colorado Department of Education | up to $100k (closes 4/13)

🌦️ Data Engineer | Washington State Department of Ecology | up to $124k

🐻 Senior Data Scientist | County of Los Angeles, Department of Economic Opportunity | up to $160k

🇺🇲 Data & AI Lead Engineer | Amtrak | up to $134k

🇺🇲 Data & AI Enablement Lead | Amtrak | up to $134k

🇺🇲 Lead Metadata & Data Products Specialist | Amtrak | up to $134k

🇺🇲 Senior Metadata & Data Products Specialist | Amtrak | up to $111k

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍀 Director of Cloud and Automation | Massachusetts Executive Office of Technology Services and Security | up to $185k

🍎 Solutions Developer | New York City Department of Housing Preservation Development | up to $119k

🍎 Principal Platform Engineer | MTA | up to $184k

🔔Chief of Legacy Application Team | Pennsylvania Office of Administration | up to $134k (closes 4/17)

🦀 Engineering - Senior Tech Lead | Maryland Digital Service | up to $180k (closes 4/15)

🦀 Software Engineer | Baltimore County | up to $134k

🦀 Sr. Production Support Engineer | U.S. Department of Labor | up to $158k (closes 4/13)

🐊 Software Developer | Metropolitan Government of Nashville & Davidson County | up to $125k (closes 4/13)
🐊 .NET Technical Lead/Software Team Leader | Florida Legislature | up to $115k

🏔️ Cloud Infrastructure Manager | Colorado Department of State | up to $145k (closes 4/12; only open to current CO residents)

🌦️ Toxics Cleanup Program Software Engineer | Washington State Department of Ecology | up to $113k

🌦️ Enterprise Architect - ORCA | Sound Transit | up to $242k

Executive Leadership

🍀 Director of Digital Services | City of Somerville | up to $110k

🌽 Chief Technology Officer | Oklahoma Department of Human Services | up to $165k

🌽 Chief Transformation Officer | Minnesota Department of Children, Youth and Families | up to $169k (closes 4/20)

🌦️ Deputy Director and Chief Innovation Officer | King County Department of Information Technology | up to $277k (closes 4/13)

🌦️ Director, Business Transformation | Sound Transit | up to $268k

🌦️ Deputy Chief Information Officer | Sound Transit | up to $315k

🐻 Director of Innovation | Office of San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie | up to $200k

Accessibility

🍀 Project-Based Drupal Web Content Specialist | Commonwealth of Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Development | $40/hr (contract role)

🏔️ Digital Accessibility Program Administrator | Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment | up to $78k (closes 4/10)

Internships & Fellowships

🍀 Design Intern – Design System | Massachusetts Digital Service | up to $22/hr

🍎 AI Intern | New York City Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $26.23/hr

🍎 Smart Cities & IoT Intern | New York City Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $26.23/hr
🍎 Emerging Technologies Research Intern | New York City Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $26.23/hr

Thanks for reading! #PublicSectorJobBoard is a reader-supported work. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on posts and support my work. Share the publication with someone you think may be interested.

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This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs - Mar 24, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 13:31:20 GMT

📢 The #PublicSectorJobBoard provides you with a regular digest of US-based government news, resources & jobs in #tech and #innovation.

🗣 Hiring in government? Hosting a civic tech event? Share your open role or event for the next edition of the job board.

Announcements & Reads

🚨Partnership for Public Service released federal employee job satisfaction data (something the federal gov is legally required to do but has not been) and the results are alarming. The average engagement score across agencies has dropped from around 70 in 2024 to below 30 in 2025. Even more worrying, only 1 in 4 employees believe they can report wrongdoing without retribution. Don Moynihan of Better Government Lab has a more detailed piece on this topic, and Elizabeth Linos, one of the leading researchers studying government employees and performance, has also raised the alarm.

🪶 The Matrítech Initiative (Emergence Circle and Natives in Tech) are hosting small virtual listening sessions with Indigenous women and Two-spirit relatives to talk about AI. Learn more and sign up here.

📋 Interested in how states hire, pay, evaluate and retain workers? You’re not alone (I’m right there with you!). The Niskanen Center and the National Academy of Public Administration released the State Human Resources and Benchmarking Study, a comprehensive inventory of state personnel practices covering 44 states. Dive into the report here.

💭 GovTech Barbados released their initial findings from their research of what Bajan residents want from government services. Follow along with the growing team as they work to improve government services across Barbados.

👍 Estonia recently became the first country to enable sharing government-held data with other stakeholders on the basis of consent. People now have more control over their personal data, can view consents centrally and can track data exchanges. This not only gives more control back to citizens, but also enables the state to have a unified mechanism to share data cross services and sectors.

💡 In New York State? Governor Hochul’s team is accepting recommendations that would cut red tape and make government work better. There is a new portal for New Yorkers to identify regulations, policies and practices that add unnecessary process or undue burden to things like building housing and infrastructure, supporting small businesses or enabling access to services. The portal is open through April 3.

Events

☕ Atlanta: Join Civic Tech Atlanta for Civic Tech Morning on Friday, March 27 at 8:30am. Details here.

📅 NYC: The NYC Civic Tech’ish happy hour is back for spring on April 8. Register here.

📅 NYC: Nava is hosting a happy hour during Open Data week in NYC. Join on Wednesday, March 25 to connect with others interested in the future of open data and technology. Register here.

📅 NYC: This week is open data week in NYC! There are free events taking place across the city. Check out the program here.

🍩 Los Angeles: Data + Donuts is back on March 25 in Los Angeles with Dr. David Blekhman, talking about his work in hydrogen transportation and clean energy. Register here.

🔐 Virtual: Join the Procurement Excellence Network to learn about Vendor Lock-in: How to Spot It & Mitigate It on March 26 from 2-3pm ET. Register here.

📈 NYC: NYC School of Data, a weekend conference exploring the role open data plays in NYC, is taking place on March 28-29 in Long Island City as part of Open Data Week. Register here.

📅 NYC: Commonweal Ventures is hosting a GovTech Happy Hour in NYC on Tuesday, April 14. Register here.

♾️ Virtual: The Local Government Hispanic Network is hosting a webinar on March 31 to close out Women’s History Month. Join online for Adelante: Building a Legacy of Latina Leadership in Local Government to hear from 5 Latina leaders in city government. Register here.

🏹 Virtual: Hear from state and local government leaders on Thursday, March 26 about The Arc of CX Modernization: From Foundations to Human-Centered Services. Hear from leaders from across the country including CT, NJ, NY, MN and more during this two hour session. Register here.

Highlighted Roles

⛷️ Colorado is looking for a leader to help define the enterprise architecture for Colorado moving forward. As demonstrated by the Governor’s support of Colorado Digital Service, they are designing state government technology and excited to dive into uncharted waters. If you are looking for a challenging role dedicated to building a modern, integrated approach with Coloradans at the center, join the team as the Principal Director of Enterprise Architecture.

📈 The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health is reopening the filing period for their Data Scientist exam. In LA, candidates who pass the assessment are placed on a list in order of score for 12 months that is used to fill data science vacancies across the agency. Filing opened March 23. Apply here.

🪪 California Department of Technology is hiring a leader for its statewide digital identity program. The Deputy Director of the Digital Identity Program will help shape how California residents are identified when they access digital services online.

🌦️ The City of Seattle is hiring a Chief Technology Officer to lead IT throughout the city and serve as the primary technology advisor to the mayor, city council and executive leadership throughout the city. This is a cabinet-level position, overseeing an organization of over 600 employees.

🧒 Allegheny County is hiring a Senior Product Manager for child welfare. They are digging deep to improve how the county serves children, and are looking for someone excited about navigating this high stakes area with empathy and discipline.

🚌 The MBTA has a great opportunity for an early career technologist interested in moving into transit and government. They are hiring an Operations Technology Analyst (Bus Tech) that bridges their innovative Technology Innovation Department and their Operations, Planning, Scheduling and Strategy department. The role will help ensure that schedule and service data is accurate and up-to-date.

🔔 The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is looking for recent graduates with advanced degrees (master’s or doctorate) for a one-year fellow in STEM in state agencies. The Governor’s Science and Technology Fellowship provides leadership development training and opportunities to network with leaders in both the public and private sectors. Potential projects include focus on the use of artificial intelligence in agency operations, how to better use data and analytics and more. Apply here.

Open Roles

UX, Design and Innovation

🍀 Content Strategist | MBTA | up to $75/hr (full-time contract role)

🍎 Principal Designer | MTA Digital Services | up to $190k

🌽 Director of Technology Adaptation & Growth | City of Detroit | up to $168k (closes April 2)

🌽 Content Manager Lead | City of Chicago | starts at $97k (closes March 25)

🦀 Web Content Producer | U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics | up to $133k (closes March 27)

🐊 Web Content Manager | City of Raleigh | up to $140k (closes March 25)

🏔️ Digital Communications Program Manager | City of Boulder | up to $100k (closes March 31)

Product and Program Management

🍀 Director of Product Management | MBTA | up to $170k (closes March 26)

🍀 Operations Technology Analyst (Bus Tech) | MBTA | up to $70/hr (full-time contract role)

🍎 Product Owner | NYS Higher Education Services Corporation | up to $85k (closes March 30)

🍎 IT Product Specialist | New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene | up to $103k

🍎 Manager, Product Development | MTA | up to $189k

🍎 Director, Product Development - Timekeeping | MTA | up to $216k

🔔 Senior Product Manager | Allegheny County Department of Human Services | up to $120k

🦀 Product Manager | Baltimore County | up to $163k (closes April 1)

🐊 IT Innovation Strategist | City of Lakeland, FL | up to $134k

🐊 Technology Innovation Initiative Manager | Louisiana Department of Health, Office of Rural Health Transformation | up to $118k (closes March 31)

🏔️ Atlassian Product and Solution Owner | Colorado Department of Human Services | up to $103k (closes April 3)

🐻 Senior Product Manager | California Office of Data and Innovation | up to $168k

🐻 Deputy Director, Benefit and Enrollment Technology Support Division | California Health and Human Services Office of Technology and Solutions Integration | up to $173k (closes March 24)

🐻 Deputy Director of the Digital Identity Program | California Department of Technology | up to $173k (closes April 5)

🇺🇲 Product Manager | Federal Student Aid | up to $197k (closes March 31)

Emerging Tech

🍎 Senior Policy Analyst for Technology & Innovation | NYC Office of the Mayor | up to $120k

🏔️ Principal AI Architect | Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology | up to $175k (closes March 30; 💻remote within Colorado)

🌦️ Tech Industry Strategic Advisor | City of Seattle | up to $162k

🌵 Lead Systems Analyst - AI | City of Tucson | up to $110k

🐻 Artificial Intelligence Officer | City of Palm Desert | up to $148k

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍀 Senior Data Scientist | Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization | up to $100k

🍀 Data Governance Lead (Contractor) | Massachusetts Department of Mental Health | up to $104/hr (full-time contract position)

🍀 Director of Data Enablement and Architecture | Massachusetts Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS) | up to $198k

🍀 Senior Data Scientist | Massachusetts Office of the State Auditor | up to $134k

🍎 Data Scientist- Worker Protection | NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection | up to $100k

🍎 Director of Business Analysis | NYC Office of Technology and Innovation, Office of Data Analytics | up to $140k

🍎 Director of Data Communication | NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Environmental Surveillance and Policy | up to $112k

🍎 Marketing Analytics & Measurement Lead | New Jersey Office of Innovation | up to $128k

🦀 Data Scientist | The Lab @ DC | up to $120k (closes April 6)

🦀 Data Analytics Lead | City of Baltimore, Office of Performance and Innovation | up to $141k

🦀 Senior Manager, Data and Research | WMATA | 🤷 (closes March 26)

🏔️ Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Manager | Colorado Department of Education | up to $100k

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍀 Software Engineer | MBTA | up to $90/hr (full-time contract role)

🍎 Senior Software Engineer | NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity | up to $125k

🍎 Application Developer & Database Engineer | NYS Office of the MTA Inspector General | up to $145k

🍎 Solutions Developer | New York City Department of Housing Preservation Development | up to $119k

🍎 Senior Software Engineer I - Technical Operations & Quality Engineering | New York Public Library | up to $130k (closes March 27)

🌦️ Power Platform Administrator & Developer | Oregon Judicial Department | up to $159k (closes March 25)

🐻 Full-stack Software Developer | California Highway Patrol | up to $104k (closes April 1)

Executive Leadership

🍎 Executive Director, Technology Strategy | New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission | up to $189k

🍎 Senior Director, Infrastructure Portfolio Management | NYC Office of Technology and Innovation | up to $200k

🦀 Chief of Digital Services | Maryland Department of Labor, Family and Medical Leave Insurance | up to $162k (closes April 2)

🏔️ Principal Director of Enterprise Architecture | Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology | up to $185k (closes April 2)

🌦️ Chief Technology Officer | City of Seattle | up to $357k (closes March 31)

🐻 Chief Technology Officer | California State Air Resources Board | up to $174k

Accessibility

🍎 Digital Inclusion Officer (DIO) & ADA Compliance Specialist – Web Development | NYC Department of Probation | up to $142k

Internships & Fellowships

🍀 Generative AI Research and Evaluation Fellow | City of Boston | $25/hr (part-time)

🍀 Digital Services/Digital Accessibility Intern | MassDOT | $20/hr (full-time)

🍀 Digital Governance and Policy Intern | Massachusetts Executive Office of Technology Services and Security (EOTSS) | $22/hr (full-time)

🍀 Summer Intern - Data Analytics | Massachusetts Department of Revenue | up to $35/hr (full-time)

🍎 Platform Developer Intern | NYC Administration for Children’s Services | $19.50/hr

🍎 Application and Database Development Intern | NYC Department of Buildings | $19.50/hr

🍎 Data Science, Emerging Talent Intern (Summer) | MTA | up to $21/hr

🍎 Data Engineer, Emerging Talent Intern (Summer) | MTA | up to $21/hr

This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs - Mar 6, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:31:08 GMT

📢 The #PublicSectorJobBoard provides you with a regular digest of US-based government news, resources & jobs in #tech and #innovation.

🗣 Hiring in government? Hosting a civic tech event? Share your open role or event for the next edition of the job board.

Announcements & Reads

🤝 The Cherokee Nation and Center for Civic Futures wrapped up the first Tribal Innovation Summit last week in Tulsa, focused on how AI can advance tribal sovereignty and address Native priorities. You can see some of the immediate takeaways from organizers and attendees like Theodora Skeadas, Rusty Pickens, Paula Starr (CIO of Cherokee Nation), and Center for Civic Futures, but keep an eye out for further read-outs.

💾 Indigenous communities around the world are exploring the potential use of AI in language preservation. In North America, one of the people working to protect endangered languages is Michael Running Wolf. Through First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR), he is using community-centered AI development to help scale pronunciation guidance and practice, helping fill the structural gap that comes from a shortage of fluent speakers and teachers of endangered languages. The work comes with concerns: data sovereignty is a major concern for many tribes, and tech companies are not often known to be forthcoming with personal data. Read more here and check out Michael’s TEDx Talk.

💰 Waldo Jaquith lays out the biggest reasons why government software is often both expensive and bad in his latest post. We’re in a self-fulfilling loop where government staff don’t know how much software should cost, and rely on vendors to guide them through the black box. If you are at all interested in how we can deliver better services faster and at a lower cost, it is worth your time to dig into Waldo’s work.

🏫 Cornell Tech launched their Urban Innovation Fellow program in 2024, placing mid-career technologists in NYC government agencies to help advance critical projects. Over a year into the program, they’ve shared about how they’ve collaborated with agencies to build a sustainable partnership, and about the work being done at the Sanitation Department, Housing Authority and more. Read more here.

🎧 If you’re looking to learn more about local government directly from the people in it, check out the GovLove Podcast from Engaging Local Government Leaders (ELGL)! One of the latest episodes featured Alex Lawrence, the Chief People Officer for the City of Boston. Coming from a digital services and technology background, Alex stepped into the Chief People Officer role in 2022, bringing a new perspective and approach to human capital and people operations, at the core of all of the work government delivers.

🍎 The New York State of the State Address this year was focused on making government work better. The Office of Customer Experience shared some of the key accomplishments from 2025 as well as what’s ahead in 2026 to support the governor’s mission.

Events

☕ Boston: Join the Berkman Klein Center at Hard University to welcome their new fellows and introduce them to the public interest technology community on March 11, alongside folks from Public Interest Tech New England, Boston Technologists for the Public Good, Code for Boston and All Tech is Human Boston. RSVP here.

📈 Indiana: The Indiana Management Performance Hub is looking for presenters for Data Day 2026 taking place in April. They are open to sessions in tracks including AI & Emerging Technology, Data Governance & Privacy, Visualization & Analytics and Data in Action. Learn more here and submit your proposal by March 18.

🍺 Seattle: Join Bloom Works and U.S. Digital Response on Thursday, March 12 for the next Seattle Public Interest Tech Happy Hour. Register here.

📅 NYC: The NYC Open Data Team at the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), BetaNYC and Data Through Design are hosting their annual Open Data Week from Sunday, March 22 - Sunday, March, 29. While NYC School of Data rounds out the week, there are free events all over the city. Check out the program here.

🍩 Los Angeles: Data + Donuts is back on March 25 in Los Angeles with Dr. David Blekhman, talking about his work in hydrogen transportation and clean energy. Register here.

💡 New York: Join for Open Data Trivia Night as part of NYC Open Data Week! Join your fellow data enthusiasts on Thurs, March 26 in the LES. Learn more here.

🔐 Virtual: Join the Procurement Excellence Network to learn about Vendor Lock-in: How to Spot It & Mitigate It on March 26 from 2-3pm ET. Register here.

📈 NYC: NYC School of Data is taking place on March 28-29 in Long Island City as part of Open Data Week. Day 1 features a traditional conference with presentations, workshops, lightning talks and more, while Day 2 is an unconference format. Join BetaNYC and the City’s tech, data and design communities to explore the role open data plays in NYC. Register here.

🇦🇺 Canberra, Australia/Virtual: Pia Andrews, a public sector transformation name to know with experience across Australia, Canada and the UNDP, is helping run a Policy Innovation for Public Good event at the end of March in Canberra, Australia. If you’ll be in Australia, you can register here, or follow Pia to see the recordings of key sessions after the event.

📅 NYC: The Civic Tech’ish happy hour is back for spring on April 8. Registration opens on March 11, so subscribe to their Luma calendar so you don’t miss out.

♿ Virtual: A11yJam is taking place virtually on Wednesday, April 15. Hosted by the Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation, join the people on the front lines of digital accessibility just weeks before the April 2026 deadline for state and local governments serving 50k+ people to ensure their web content and mobile apps meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. Register here.

Highlighted Roles

🚌 LA Metro is hiring a Director, Communications (Digital Product) to lead their customer-facing digital product portfolio. You will join the Digital Experience team, focused on making Metro’s digital ecosystem a cohesive customer experience platform.

🚗 The City of Detroit is hiring a Director of Technology Adaptation & Growth whose work will focus on engaging the broader Detroit community in the work of the innovation and technology department. With a mission to permanently close the Digital Divide in Detroit, this role has an opportunity to help shape how everyone from youth to the elderly are engaged in the office’s work, and ensure that residents across the city are represented.

🎨 The Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services is hiring a Lead Experience Designer. Join the team focused on streamlining how people access and manage critical government benefits. Bigger picture, they’re building tools, processes, and practices that help EOHHS agencies better serve their constituents.

Open Roles

UX, Design and Innovation

🍀 Lead Experience Designer | Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services | up to $95/hr (full-time contract role)

🦀 Civic Design Researcher | DC Department of Buildings | up to $103k (closes March 12)

🌽 Program Manager, Customer Experience | Central Ohio Transit Authority | up to $103k (closes March 13)

🌦️ Visual Communications/UX Consultant | Washington State Health Care Authority | up to $75k (closes March 12)

Product and Program Management

🍀 Principal Experience Owner & Product Manager | Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development | up to $115/hr (full-time contract role)

🍎 Director of Data Communication | NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene | up to $112k

🍎 Senior Manager-Strategic Priorities | Long Island Rail Road | up to $137k

🔔 Director of Product & Portfolio Management | Pennsylvania Health & Human Services Delivery Center | up to $182k (closes March 12)

🔔 Product Manager | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania | up to $153k (closes March 9)

🌽 Product Manager | Metropolitan Council (Twin Cities) | up to $133k (closes March 12)

🌽 Director of Technology Adaptation & Growth | City of Detroit | up to $168k (closes April 2)

🌽 Solutions Architect | City of Chicago | starts at $119k (closes March 14)

🌦️ Associate Product Manager | Washington Health Benefit Exchange | up to $102k

🐻 Director, Communications (Digital Product) | LA Metro | up to $190k (closes March 18)

🐻 Enterprise Business Automation and Development Services Manager | City of San Jose, CA | up to $208k

🐻 Director, Product Strategy & Policy Design | California Statewide Automated Welfare System | up to $203k (closes April 3)

🇺🇲 Principal Digital Product Owner - Data Platforms | Amtrak | up to $146k

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍎 Director of Enterprise Artificial Intelligence, Data, and Analytics | Office of the New York State Attorney General | up to $149k (closes March 6)

🍎 Senior Data Scientist | New York City Department of Design and Construction | up to $111k

🍎 Performance Management Analyst | New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) | up to $160k (closes March 7)

🍎 Marketing Analytics & Measurement Lead | New Jersey Innovation Authority | up to $128k

🐊 Data Analyst | Wake County, NC | up to $119k (closes March 7)

🌦️ Database Engineer | Metro Transit | up to $122k (closes March 17)

🌦️ Data and Analytics Architect | Washington State Housing Finance Commission | up to $137k

🌦️ IT Data Manager | Washington Department of Commerce | up to $144k (closes March 17)

🇺🇲 Data & AI Lead Engineer | Amtrak | up to $134k

🇺🇲 Data & AI Senior Engineer | Amtrak | up to $111k

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Senior Software Developer | New York City Department of Social Services | up to $126k

🍎 Application Developer | New York City Office of Technology & Innovation | up to $123k

🍎 Senior Mobile Apps Developer | NYC Department of Corrections | up to $135k (closes March 31)

🍎 Senior .NET Developer | New York City Department of Housing Preservation Development | up to $123k (closes March 22)

Executive Leadership

🍎 Deputy Chief Information Officer for Performance and Portfolio Management | Office of the New York State Attorney General | up to $175k (closes March 6)

🌽 Chief Transformation Officer | City of Columbus | up to $227k (closes March 31)

🏔️ Chief Technology Officer | Colorado Statewide Internet Portal Authority | up to $185k (closes March 17)

🌦️ Chief Information Security Officer | Oregon Metro | up to $184k (closes March 19)

🐻 Deputy Chief Technology Officer | Thousand Oaks City | up to $241k (closes March 23)

Internships & Fellowships

🍎 Business Analyst Intern | NYC Department of Environmental Protection, Office of Performance and Program Management | $17.93/hr

🍎 Programs and Evaluation Graduate Fellow | NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity | up to $27.50

🌦️ Data Analytics Internship | Cowlitz Public Utility District | up to $21.33/hr (closes April 12)

Thanks for reading! #PublicSectorJobBoard is a reader-supported work. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on posts and support my work. Share the publication with someone you think may be interested.

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This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs - Feb 20, 2026

Rebecca Heywood — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:47:14 GMT

📢 The #PublicSectorJobBoard provides you with a regular digest of US-based government news, resources & jobs in #tech and #innovation.

🗣 Hiring in government? Hosting a civic tech event? Share your open role or event for the next edition of the job board.

Announcements & Reads

🥇DC recently became the first major U.S. city to require responsible AI training for government staff. They’ve partnered with InnovateUS to deliver a no-cost, self-paced training to help the city’s workforce be ready to use genAI tools.

♿ Rebecca Woodbury from Department of Civic Things released a new course Web accessibility for government content managers to help government staff comply with the new federal ADA web accessibility law that goes into effect for state and local governments in April. Learn more here.

🏛️ Curious about how congressional offices actually work? Check out Statecraft’s recent post taking a deep dive into this topic.

Events

💸Join the Massachusetts Federal Funds & Infrastructure Officer, The Burnes Center for Social Change and InnovateUS to learn about Grantwell, an AI-enabled grant-writing assistance tool developed by government and designed to support real municipal workflows. Register for the February 25 session to learn more.

📈The Indiana Management Performance Hub is looking for presenters for Data Day 2026 taking place in April. They are open to sessions in tracks including AI & Emerging Technology, Data Governance & Privacy, Visualization & Analytics and Data in Action. Learn more here and submit your proposal by March 18.

♿ A11yJam is taking place virtually on Wednesday, April 15. Hosted by the Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation, join the people on the front lines of digital accessibility just weeks before the April 2026 deadline for state and local governments serving 50k+ people to ensure their web content and mobile apps meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards. Register here.

Highlighted Roles

⚕️ The California Statewide Automated Welfare System (CalSAWS) is hiring a Director of Product Strategy & Policy Design to help provide excellent case management for eligibility workers distributing benefits across Caclifornia. CalSAWS is the case management system for county eligibility staff that provides CalWORKs, CalFresh, Medi-Cal, Foster Care, Refugee Assistance, County Medical Services Program, and General Assistance/General Relief to children, families, and individuals in all 58 California counties.

🔌 Seattle Public Utilities is hiring a Digitization Program Manager to lead development of a Digitalization Strategy while driving the adoption of digital tools, streamlining processes through automation and empowering employees to thrive in a tech-enabled environment. This is a term limited role, with a term expected to last up to 35 months.

🔔 CODE PA, Pennsylvania’s digital service team, is hiring a new Head of Product Management to lead product strategy and execution. CODE PA is a creative team, pushing the boundaries of what government can do by reimagining services to make people’s lives better.

🐻 The City of Thousand Oaks recently established an Information Technology department and are looking for a Deputy Chief Technology Officer to help build and mature the department. This is a unique opportunity to help build a new department from the ground up in a forward-thinking, well-resourced city.

🌉The San Francisco Digital Services team is hiring an Engineering Director. The team’s goal is to become the source of standards and platforms that allow the City to make services for residents accessible online. Join the team as they grapple with the increased power of generative AI and be part of the Chief Digital Service Officer’s senior leadership team.

Open Roles

UX, Design and Innovation

🍎 Human-Centered Design Analyst 2 | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $121k (closes Feb 24)

🍎 Human-Centered Design Analyst 1 | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $109k (closes Feb 24)

🍎 Digital Content Specialist (Drupal) | New York State Higher Education Services Corporation | up to $85k (closes Feb 23)

🐊 Digital Content Manager | South Carolina Division of Enterprise Applications | up to $100k (closes Feb 25)

🐊 Web Accessibility Coordinator | Georgia Technology Authority | up to $67k (closes Feb 25)

🏔️ Digital Accessibility Temp Aide | Colorado Department of Public Safety | $32/hr (closes Feb 23)

Product and Program Management

🍀 Manager of Dispatch Applications | MBTA, Technology Innovation Division | up to $137k (closes Feb 26)

🍎 Assistant Director, Information Technology Services | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $160k (closes March 4)

🍎Product Manager | New York City Police Department | up to $142k (closes Feb 27)

🍎Product Owner/Business Analyst | New York City Employee’s Retirement System | up to $120k (closes March 3)

🍎 Product Management Analyst 2 | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $121k (closes Feb 24)

🍎 Product Management Analyst 1 | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $109k (closes Feb 24)

🔔 Head of Product Management | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Office of Digital Experience | up to $155k (closes Feb 22)

🏔️ Court Management System Product Owner (term-limited) | Colorado Office of the Administrative Courts | up to $110k (closes Feb 27)

🌦️ Digitization Program Manager | Seattle Public Utilities | up to $ (closes Feb 24)

🐻 Director, Product Strategy & Policy Design | California Statewide Automated Welfare System | up to $203k (closes April 3)

🇺🇲 Industry Partnerships Manager | National Institute of Standards and Technology, Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) | up to $197k (closes March 3)

Emerging Tech

🍎 Deputy Director, Responsible Artificial Intelligence Safety & Education | New York State Department of Financial Services | up to $213k (closes Feb 25)

🍎 Artificial Intelligence Analyst | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $109k (closes Feb 24)

🍎 Advanced Data & AI Architect | MTA | up to $179k

🐊 AI Enablement Speicalist | Georgia Technology Authority | up to $75k (closes Feb 25)

🇺🇲 Research Engineer/Scientist, Agent Security | National Institute of Standards and Technology, Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) | up to $197k (closes Feb 23)

🇺🇲 AI Research Scientist, Applied Systems | National Institute of Standards and Technology, Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) | up to $197k (closes March 3)

🇺🇲 AI Standards Architect | National Institute of Standards and Technology, Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) | up to $187k (closes Feb 23)

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍎 Director of Enterprise AI, Data, and Analytics | New York State Office of the Attorney General | up to $149k (closes March 6)

🐊 User Experience Data Scientist | City of El Paso, TX | up to $137k (closes Feb 24)

🌽 Data Service Lead | City of Chicago | $133k (closes Feb 27)

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Rapid Application Development Analyst 1 | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $109k (closes Feb 24)

🍎 Robotic Process Automation Analyst 1 | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $109k (closes Feb 24)

🌽 Application Development Lead | City of Chicago | $133k (closes March 5)

🏔️ Tester | Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology | up to $87k (closes Feb 24; remote within Colorado)

🐻 Applications Developer (C#, .NET, Blazor, Azure, PL/SQL & AI Tools) | Orange County Superior Court | up to $131k (closes March 5)

🐻 Engineering Director - Digital Services | City and County of San Francisco | up to $216k (closes Feb 24)

Executive Leadership

🌽 Chief Transformation Officer | City of Columbus | up to $227k (closes March 31)

🐊 Chief Information Officer | Georgia Department of Labor | 🤷(closes Feb 27)

🐻 Chief Technology Transformation Officer | California State Water Resources Control Board | up to $166k (closes March 6)

🐻 Deputy Chief Technology Officer | City of Thousand Oaks | up to $241k (closes March 23)

Internships & Fellowships

🍎 Student Internship (Higher Education Services Corporation, Legacy System Modernization) | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $26.12/hr (closes March 3)

🍎 Student Assistant Internship (Integrated Eligibility System) | New York State Department of Information Technology Services | up to $26.12/hr (closes Feb 23)

🍎 Open Data, Emerging Talent Intern | MTA | up to $21/hr

🌽 2026-2027 Yearlong Data Analyst Intern | Chicago Transit Authority, Strategic Business Initiatives | 🤷

🌦️ Data Analytics Internship | Cowlitz Public Utility District | up to $21.33/hr (closes April 12)

🐻 Court Technology Intern (Data Science and Application Development) | Orange County Superior Court | up to $22.92/hr (closes Feb 23)

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This Week in Public Sector Tech Jobs

Rebecca Heywood — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:30:32 GMT

📢 The #PublicSectorJobBoard provides you with a regular digest of US-based government news, resources & jobs in #tech and #innovation.

🗣 Hiring in government? Hosting a civic tech event? Share your open role or event for the next edition of the job board.

Announcements & Reads

🧦Beth Simone Noveck built on her recent Global AI column From Red Tape to Green Tape: Decluttering the State with AI and Collective Intelligence to share insights from Boston’s recent launch of Boston’s redesigned permitting experience. The city partnered with AI for Impact fellows to use AI to analyze 25 years of historical permit data and identify distinct permitting experiences. Check out Wicked Decluttering to learn more.

🤝 Interested in learning about a unique part of local government in New York City? Want to find new ways to get involved? Tal Roded wrote a comprehensive guide to NYC Community Boards, which play a unique advisory role in neighborhood-level planning decisions. Deadlines for Queens, Manhattan, SI and Bronx community boards are coming up. Learn more here.

🏙️ Pilot City is looking for three cities, counties or regions interested in hosting a Pitchfest in 2026. A Pitchfest is a matchmaking program where government staff present problem statements and are then paired with regional experts. Learn more here.

❣️Civic Match recently turned one! They released new data on their jobseeker community and successful matches, as well as announcing a new, updated platform to help governments discover proven talent and for public servants to find opportunities.

🧑‍💼The New Jersey Innovation Authority has a two-part blog series about their work untangling the thousands of forms from across government agencies to build business.nj.gov, a one-stop site for businesses in New Jersey. Check out part 1 of the series and hear from a tattoo shop owner about the success of the initiative.

Events

💎 Join the Procurement Excellence Network and NGIP: The Institute for Public Procurement for a webinar, Stronger Together: Unlocking Innovation & Expanding Access through AI Procurement from 2-3:30pm ET on Wednesday February 11th. Register here.

➕ Join InnovateUS for Beyond Yes And: Navigating Polarities for Government Innovation with Michael Baskin, Montgomery County Government and Kyle Patterson, City of Boise. This will be a hands-on workshop. Wednesday, February 11 from 1-2pm ET. Register here.

🍻 Seattle: Join Bloom Works and U.S. Digital Response for a Seattle Public Interest Tech Happy Hour on March 12th from 4:30-6:30pm PDT. Register here.

🍻 Boston: Join Matt Marino and Technologists for the Public Good for a Boston-area Civic Tech Meetup on Tuesday, Feb 17 from 6-8pm ET at Remnant Brewing. Register here. While attendance is free, consider adding a donation for Technologists for the Public Good when you register.

🤖 InnovateUS is hosting Santiago Garces, the Chief Information Officer for the City of Boston on March 2 for a workshop on How Not to Buy Stupid AI: A Practical Guide to Evaluating AI Products and Tools. Register here.

Highlighted Roles

🧑‍🌾 The Washington State Department of Agriculture is embarking on a full website rebuild, partnering with the state’s tech department and an outside UX consulting firm. They are hiring a Web Designer & UI/UX Specialist to serve as the internal lead for the migration and redesign effort.

🔐 Multnomah County, OR is hiring a Chief Information Security Officer who understands that security is a human endeavor powered and protected by cutting-edge technology. They are hosting a virtual Q&A for potential candidates on Wednesday, Feb 11 from 12-1pm PT. Join the Q&A here.

🧑‍💻The City of Philadelphia is hiring two critical leadership roles in their Office of Innovation and Technology.

🎨 The Chief Creative Strategy Officer will have a wide berth to use digital media, communications and storytelling to translate complex technology and equity initiatives into engaging narratives for city residents.
💻 The Chief Digital Technology Officer will drive the city’s digital transformation agenda, leading transformation for both resident-facing digital services and internal systems.

Open Roles

UX, Design and Innovation

🍀 Senior UX Designer | MBTA | up to $80/hr (contractor)

🍀 Content Strategist | MBTA | up to $75/hr (contractor)

🍎 Human-Centered Design Analyst | New York State Office of Information Technology Services | up to $121k (closes Feb 24)

🍎 Creative Director | New York City Department of Transportation | up to $117k

🔔 Coordinator of Visibility and Digital Strategy | Pennsylvania Council on the Arts | up to $90k (closes Feb 11)

🌽 Innovation and Human-Centered Design Specialist, Medicaid | Michigan Department of Health and Human Services | up to $99k (closes Feb 20)

🌦️ Web Designer & UI/UX Specialist | Washington State Department of Agriculture | up to $98k

Product and Program Management

🍀 Senior Director of Products and Services, Licensing and Permitting | City of Boston | up to $153k

🍀 Senior Product Manager | MBTA | up to $89/hr (contractor)

🍎 Director, Product Development | Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) | up to $203k

🍎 Director of System Integration | New York City Department of Youth and Community Development | up to $142k

🍎 Product Owner | New York State Higher Education Services Corporation | up to $121k (closes Feb 14)

🍎 Product Manager | New York State Agency Office of Information Technology Services | up to $121k (closes Feb 24)

🍎 Product Manager | New Jersey Office of Innovation | up to $144k

🔔 Product & Services Portfolio Manager | City of Philadelphia | up to $100k

🔔 Senior Product Manager - Special Projects | Allegheny County Department of Human Services | up to $120k

🐊 Innovation Administrator | City of San Antonio, TX | up to $144k (closes Feb 18)

🌽 Digital Program Manager | Iowa Public Employees’ Retirement System | up to $96k (closes Feb 15)

⛰️ Digital Accessibility Program Manager | City of Boulder, CO | up to $110k (closes Feb 11)

⛰️ Manager of Projects (remote in Colorado) | Colorado Governor’s Office of Information Technology | up to $130k (closes Feb 11)

🌦️ Innovations Program Manager | Washington Department of Social and Health Services | up to $93k (closes Feb 17)

🐻 Product Analyst | California Department of Technology | up to $104k (closes Feb 20)

🐻 Policy Product Portfolio Manager | California State Compensation Insurance Fund | up to $138k (closes Feb 19)

🇺🇲 Principal Digital Product Owner | Amtrak | up to $146k

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🍀 Senior Data Analyst | MassDOT & MBTA Office of Performance Management & Innovation | up to $133k

🍎 Manager, Strategic Initiatives | Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) | up to $129k

🍎 Product Data and Analytics Lead | New Jersey Office of Innovation | up to $106k

🍎 Executive Director of Operations Research | New York City Department of Correction | up to $150k

🍎 Data Scientist | New York City Housing Authority | up to $110k

🍎 AI Analyst | New York State Office of Information Technology Services | up to $121k (closes Feb 24)

🔔 Data Engineer/Integration Specialist | City of Philadelphia | up to $80k

🌦️ Data Analytics Advisor | Seattle Fire Department | up to $176k (closes March 3)

⛰️ AI Data Engineer | Utah Office of the State Auditor | up to $124k (closes Feb 27)

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍀 Deputy Director of Software Engineering | MBTA | up to $150k (closes Feb 20)

🍎 AI Architect | New York State Office of Information Technology Services | up to $121k (closes Feb 24)

🍎 Senior Software Engineer- Full Stack | Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) | up to $149k

🍎 Power Platform/Power BI Solution Developer | New York City Department of City Planning | up to $125k

🔔 Software Engineer-Mobile Development (Android) | City of Philadelphia | up to $80k

🌦️ Technology and Development Team Leader | King County, WA | up to $199k (closes March 2)

🐻 PermitSF Solutions Architect | City and County of San Francisco | 🤷(closes Feb 22)

Executive Leadership

🌲 Chief Technology & Enterprise Services Officer | Vermont Digital Services Agency | up to $160k

🍎 Chief Information Officer | State of Delaware | up to $187k (closes Feb 20)

🔔 Chief Digital Technology Officer | City of Philadelphia | up to $175k

🔔 Chief Creative Strategy Officer | City of Philadelphia | up to $175k

🐊 County Executive - Innovative Justice and Program Analysis | Travis County, TX | up to $224k (closes Feb 27)

⛰️ Chief Technology Officer | Colorado Statewide Internet Portal Authority | up to $185k (closes March 17)

🌦️ Assistant Vice President of Applications and Innovation | King County Housing Authority | up to $202k (closes Feb 26)

🌦️ Chief Information Security Officer | Multnomah County, OR | up to $205k (closes Feb 22)

🐻 Chief, IT Solutions Delivery | California High Speed Rail Authority | up to $166k (closes Feb 23)

🐻 Head of Cloud Platforms and AI | California Department of Industrial Relations | up to $166k (closes Feb 19)

Internships & Fellowships

🍀 Security Engineering Intern | Massachusetts Executive Office of Technology Services and Security | $21/hr

🍎 Product Development, Tech & Engineering Fellow (Summer) | Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) | up to $23/hr

🐊 Policy & Innovation Intern | Harris County, TX | 🤷 (closes Feb 20)

🏔️ Process Improvement and Change Management Intern | Colorado Department of Transportation | $23/hr (closes Feb 28)

🐻 Summer Intern, IT and AI | Santa Clara Valley Water District, Innovation Unit | $28.27/hr (closes Feb 15)

🐻 Court Technology Intern | Superior Court of Orange County | up to $3,972/month (closes Feb 23)

January 21, 2026 - Public Sector Job Board

Rebecca Heywood — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:45:22 GMT

📢 The #PublicSectorJobBoard provides you with a regular digest of US-based government news, resources & jobs in #tech and #innovation.

🗣 Hiring in government? Hosting a civic tech event? Share your open role or event for the next edition of the job board.

Announcements

📋 The Public Sector Job Board Subscriber Survey is still open! Help shape what the newsletter will look like in 2026 and beyond.

Take the survey

Reads

🪸 Time magazine highlighted the efforts of Denice Ross (chief U.S. data scientist under Biden), Rebecca Lindsey (the former website manager of climate.gov) and a myriad of other women who are working to preserve environment and climate data.

🛠️Former U.S. Digital Service Administrator Mikey Dickerson and other former USDS leaders have launched Tech Viaduct, an effort to have a plan to fix government services that are broken and fix the damage DOGE has done with the premise that rapid change is possible in government. Learn more here.

🇲🇽David Bates reflected on Mexico’s path toward digital public infrastructure for Apolitical. Mexico has long been a leader in digital services and recently launched the National Public Technology Repository which allows states and municipalities to access already operational government solutions and replicate them at no or low cost. With solutions like LlaveMX (a single digital identity for government services and programs) and VisorUrbano (a one-stop for business licenses and needs), the US stands to learn from Mexico and other countries further along in digital transformation. Read more in English or Spanish.

🔍Elizabeth Bond, the former Senior Advisor to the Chief Technologist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Emerging Tech Policy, just released How to Hire Technologists: A Guide for State Enforcers. The guide is intended for state AGs, enforcers, or organizations that need technical expertise to support investigations, research, and cases involving technology companies. Many cases now depend on understanding how AI, data, and digital products work, and these organizations needs technologists that can support investigations, analyze data, and translate complex systems into insights lawyers can act on.

💭Abigail Haddad, a former federal technologist, wrote a very thoughtful piece for those considering applying to newly open technology jobs at the federal government, taking into consideration the moment and what to consider before taking a role.

🤖Beth Simone Noveck reflected on her experiences in and with government in her new piece From Red Tape to Green Tape: Decluttering the State with AI and Collective Intelligence. Take a look to learn about how governments have approached decluttering in the past, and what they are doing today.

🏘️The NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development recently released two new datasets focused on their affordable housing lotteries. Check out data on Advertised Lotteries on Housing Connect By Building and Advertised Lotteries on Housing Connect by Lottery.

🧑‍🔬Apply for the Aspen Policy Academy Science and Technology Policy Fellowship! The fellowship is for science and technology experts with limited policy experience who want to learn how to impact policy. There is a full-time policy bootcamp from June 1-26. You’ll get a $5,000 stipend to defray costs. Apply here by February 5.

Events

📊NYC Open Data Week is coming up and still accepting session proposals! Open Data Week is an annual festival of community-driven events organized and produced by the NYC Open Data Team at the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), BetaNYC, and Data Through Design. The 2026 Festival kicks off at the opening of Data Through Design‘s annual art exhibition and there are dozens of virtual and in-person events throughout the week, closing out with BetaNYC’s annual civic tech conference, NYC School of Data, taking place at CUNY School of Law in Long Island City. Learn more here.

📍Join Apolitical for the online release event of their ‘50 States, 50 Breakthroughs’ report on Thursday, February 12. Learn about projects from every US state and several territories that are transforming public sector delivery. Register here.

🇨🇦Heidi Wang, a Canada Free Agents alum, is hosting a Gov Action Cafe in Ottawa on Saturday, June 13. Gov Action Cafe is a one-day unconference focused on how the public service could tackle the critical challenges Canada is facing. Learn more here.

🏗️ David Eaves is chairing a hybrid session at Chatham House on Building Tomorrow’s Digital Public Infrastructure on January 22nd at 5:30pm UK time. Learn about the global movement towards DPI adoption and how countries worldwide are approaching the digital future. Register here.

Highlighted Roles

🇧🇧GovTech Barbados is hiring across disciplines to transform how Barbadians interact with their government. They have open contract roles for Full Stack & Front-End Developers, Cloud Infrastructure Developers, Product Managers & Agile Delivery Managers and Service & Interaction Designers. While there is a preference for folks in Barbados locally, they are open to remote global candidates. Check out their open roles.

Open Roles

UX, Design and Innovation

🍎 UX and Interface Designer | NYC Administration for Children’s Services | up to $135k (closes Feb 6)

🔔 Director of Organizational Change Management | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania | up to $182k (closes Jan 21)

🦀 Senior Analyst, Innovation Team | Maryland Governor’s Office | up to $104k (closes Feb 3)

🐊 Business Process Consultant | City of Austin | up to $90k (closes Jan 28)

🌽 Innovation and Human-Centered Design Specialist | Michigan Department of Health and Human Services | up to $99k (closes Feb 20)

🌽 Lean Team Process Improvement Project Manager | City of Detroit | up to $125k (closes Jan 23)

Product and Program Management

🔔 Portfolio Manager - Strategic Plan and Governance | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania | up to $153k (closes Jan 21)

🦀 Product Manager, Websites | Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) | 🤷 (closes Jan 26)

🦀 Chief Director of Innovation | Fairfax County, VA | up to $230k (closes Jan 23)

🌦️ Product Line Owner | Washington State Department of Corrections | up to $130k (closes Jan 28)

🌦️ Product Manager - ORCA | Sound Transit | up to $180k

🌽 Digital Opportunity Specialist | City of Bloomington, IN | up to $90k (closes Feb 9)

Tech Policy

🦀 Senior AI Advisor | State of Maryland, Department of Information Technology | up to $198k

Data, Analytics and Measurement

🔔 Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania | up to $196k (closes Jan 21)

🍎 Director, Product Development | MTA | up to $203k

🍎 Product Data and Analytics Lead | New Jersey State Office of Innovation | up to $106k

🦀 Senior Program Analyst, Data Products & AI | City of Baltimore, Mayor’s Office of Performance and Innovation | up to $120k (closes Feb 28)

🌽 Senior Data Scientist | Indiana Supreme Courts | up to $105k (closes Jan 27)

⛰️ AI Data Engineer | State of Utah, State Auditor | up to $124k (closes Feb 27)

🌦️ Innovation & Asset Management Lead | Tacoma Public Utilities | up to $171k (closes Jan 26)

🌦️ Senior Research & Data Analyst | King County Housing Authority | up to $115k (closes Feb 2)

🌦️ Data Strategist | City of Seattle | up to $162k (closes Jan 27)

Engineering and Cybersecurity

🍎 Chief Technical Officer | NYC Department of Finance | up to $224k (closes Jan 26)

🍎 Technology Operations Director | New Jersey Office of Innovation | up to $155k

🍎 Senior Software Engineer- Full Stack | MTA, Product Development | up to $149k

🍎 Director of Software Engineering (AI and Data) | New York Public Library | up to $185k

🍎 Director of Software Engineering (Readers, Learners and Institutional Services) | New York Public Library | up to $185k

🔔 Director of Cloud Engineering | Commonwealth of Pennsylvania | up to $174k (closes Jan 21)

🌽Identity and Access Management (IAM) Team Lead | City of St. Paul, MN | up to $130k (closes Jan 26)

🐻 PermitSF Solutions Architect | City and County of San Francisco | 🤷

Thanks for reading! #PublicSectorJobBoard is a reader-supported work. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on posts and support my work. Share the publication with someone you think may be interested.

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A look back at the Public Sector Job Board in 2025

Rebecca Heywood — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:29:25 GMT

In 2025, you read, you clicked, you (hopefully) applied. It was a tough year for the civic tech sector, particularly for folks at the federal level, who may have been on teams that were eliminated or whose professional landscape has shifted dramatically. It was a tough year for me personally as well. But we are in a new year and a new chapter, and I am excited for what this year will hold.

2025 was also the first full year since moving the newsletter to Substack, and that means lots of data to dig into. I wanted to learn what roles and resources in civic tech actually excite you and what is beneficial to inform what the newsletter should look like in 2026. I tracked every click across 13 newsletters and 600+ job listings to understand what you’re actually looking for—and what you’re ignoring.

In addition to looking at the data, I also want to hear directly from you. I’ve put together a short subscriber survey to understand who you are, what you’re looking for and where you think the Public Sector Job Board should go in 2026 and beyond.

Take the subscriber survey

Here’s what I learned from you all, and what it means for the year to come.

By the Numbers

The Big Picture

13 newsletters published
676 jobs featured
Over 10,000 total clicks on job listing links
5,037 subscribers in December 2025 (up from 1,731 in January 2025)

Beyond the Jobs

It wasn’t just jobs. You also engaged with:

36 events — happy hours, conferences, and meetups around the country
65 reads and resources— staying up to date with essays, case studies, and policy commentary as well as hungry for career guides, fellowship programs, and team information

Your Top 10 Most Popular Jobs

Worth noting: Not all of the most popular jobs are in the most popular regions. The #1 job this year—Qualitative Researcher at the Metropolitan Council—was in the Midwest. The #9 job was in Colorado. When the role is right and the org has a reputation for doing good work, you’ll look beyond your usual geographies.

The pattern: 7 of your top 10 are UX, design, research, or product roles. You’re not just looking for government jobs—you’re looking for civic tech jobs.

What Else You Clicked On

It’s not just about the jobs. Some of your most-clicked content wasn’t job listings at all.

🎉 Events: You Want Community

Happy hours and meetups were huge this year. The most popular:

NYC civic tech happy hours
Boston public interest tech happy hours
Bay Area happy hours
FormFest
dotgovdesign.org
CityCamp

Regional meetups, design conferences, hack nights—you showed up for all of it. You’re not just looking for jobs in isolation. You want to meet people, swap stories, and feel part of something.

📚 Reads: You Care About Context

You come not just for the jobs, but to learn about new resources about what is happening in civic tech. The essays and commentary you clicked on most:

Don Moynihan on “The Death of Direct File”
Jesse Gardner from NY State on design systems and AI
“Should I Stay or Go” - technologists debating the federal moment
USDS’s “It has come to our attention” post
Portland Digital Services 2025 work
NY Focus on MyCity and child care
SF.gov redesign deep dive
Propel’s technical post on SNAP and LLMs
Mark Headd on legacy system modernization

You want to understand the landscape—what’s working, what’s broken, and what it all means.

🚀 General Recruitment & Fellowships: Breaking In

It isn’t always just about the specific jobs. Org-wide hiring pages and fellowship programs got massive engagement:

NY State Digital Service Jobs page
NJ Office of Innovation careers
Maryland Digital Service recruitment
Work for America’s CivicMatch
Paragon Fellowship
Aspen Science & Tech Policy Fellowship
USDR’s “Build a Better Government Resume” guide

Whether you’re exploring civic tech or helping others get in, “how do I break into this field” content consistently resonates.

🔗 Resources & Community

You also clicked on tools, org pages, and community resources:

LinkedIn civic tech groups
An Unofficial Guide to NYC Government Job Postings
Lab @ DC jobs page
We The Builders

What You Loved

🏆 Most Popular Category: UX/Design/Research

You explored UX and design roles at more than 2x the rate of engineering roles. Service designers, researchers, content strategists—I see you.

🏛️ Most Popular Organizations

The orgs you wanted to learn more about:

New York Public Library — Every product role they posted was a hit
Maryland Digital Service — Digital producers, designers, product owners
City of Boston — Service design, data science, UX leadership
New Jersey Office of Innovation — Across the board
California Office of Data and Innovation — Research, data, UX

You want innovation-minded teams at government agencies that get it. You want to do modern, human-centered work—just in public service.

💰 Salary Sweet Spot: $150-175k

Roles in this range got the most engagement. Senior enough to be interesting, achievable enough to feel relevant.

📍 Most Popular Regions

New York / New Jersey
New England (especially Boston)
DC / Maryland / Virginia
California
Pacific Northwest

What Didn’t Land

This is the part where I get honest with you.

About 40% of listings had fewer than 7 of you check them out; some had zero. While a handful of people found those roles useful, it’s a signal that certain types of jobs aren’t connecting with most of you.

The patterns:

Traditional IT titles at traditional agencies “Application Developer - [State Agency]” didn’t resonate the way “Product Designer - [State Digital Service]” did. Same government, different framing, very different response.

Lower-salary roles at lesser-known orgs Roles under $75k rarely got much traction unless they were prestigious fellowships or internships at orgs you already recognized.

Certain regions Jobs in smaller cities—particularly in the Southeast and Southwest—struggled to gain traction, even when the roles themselves were solid. Your interest clusters heavily in the Northeast, California, and the Pacific Northwest.

A note on this last one:

I intentionally have tried to feature a diversity of geographies and organization types. I don’t want this newsletter to be only “the same five employers every week.” Governments across the country are moving towards digital. There are opportunities across the country where you could be the one to build a design practice, modernize a legacy system, or bring human-centered thinking to an agency that’s never had it.

Those roles are harder sells. They don’t come with a built-in innovation brand or a team of peers. But they’re real opportunities to make an outsized impact—if you’re up for being a pioneer rather than joining an established program.

I’ll keep featuring them selectively, because someone reading this might be exactly the person to take that leap. But I hear you that they’re not what most of you are looking for.

What This Tells Me

You’re not here for “government IT jobs.” You’re here for:

Civic tech — modern practices, human-centered work
Innovation teams — digital services, labs, R&D groups
Transformation roles — helping government work better
Mission-driven product and design work - enough said
Community — events, happy hours, and connection with others doing this work
Context — understanding the policy landscape and what’s happening in the field

You want to do meaningful work with modern methods—and you want to do it alongside people who get it.

What This Means for 2026

Based on what I learned, there will be some adjustments in the year ahead:

1. More signal, less noise

I’m going to be more selective. Roles that consistently don’t resonate—traditional IT titles at non-innovation orgs, very low-salary roles at unknown agencies—will be deprioritized. The goal is a list of jobs that make you go “oh, I want to do that”.

2. Leaning into what works

This may mean fewer jobs in each newsletter since these teams are still growing, but the ones that are featured will resonate. Expect more:

UX, design, and research roles (when they exist)
Product management
Innovation and transformation leadership
Content design and strategy
Roles at digital service teams, labs and other teams ahead of the curve

3. More community and context

You clicked on events and reads almost as much as jobs. I’m going to lean into that:

More consistent coverage of civic tech events and happy hours
Curated reads that help you understand the landscape
Spotlighting fellowships and “breaking in” resources

4. Better context on listings

Where I can, I’ll add more signal about whether an org “gets it”—things like team structure, mission and values, or what people say about working there.

Help Me Make It Better

I’m running a short survey to hear directly from you:

What roles are you actually looking for?
What regions matter to you?
What would make listings more useful?
What else would you want from this newsletter?

Take the subscriber survey

Your answers will directly shape what this newsletter looks like in 2026.

Thank You

To everyone who subscribed, clicked, shared, and landed roles in 2025—thank you. This newsletter exists because there’s a community of people who believe government can work better, and want to be part of making that happen. I look forward to continuing to grow our community in 2026 and beyond.

— Rebecca

P.S. The Average Public Sector Job Board Reader

Based on aggregate click data, the average Public Sector Job Board reader is:

A senior-level UX researcher or product manager in the Northeast, currently employed but passively open, drawn to innovation teams at state and city government, skeptical of traditional IT departments, and willing to look at anything posted by the New York Public Library.

Sound like you? You’re in good company.