Government & Public Sector

Government engagements don't come with much flexibility. Deadlines are real, scrutiny is high, and the people depending on these systems often have nowhere else to turn. The software has to be right — not approximately right, not right enough for a first release. Right. We've delivered under those conditions across federal agencies, state government, and workforce reentry programs, and we don't show up to learn on the job.

Federal infrastructure at the detail level

The U.S. General Services Administration manages the federal government's real property portfolio — construction, maintenance, and long-term infrastructure planning across the country. For a GSA contractor, we built a cost estimation application that supported both project approval decisions and annual budget planning at a level of detail that reflects how the federal government actually thinks about its buildings.

Inputs ran to hundreds of parameters: square footage, region, floor count, room-level specifics down to the number of janitor closets, conference rooms with A/V capability, and prison cells. Regional variation affected not just real estate and construction costs but weather-driven maintenance estimates — a building in Minnesota carries different 100-year costs than the same building in Arizona. The output was a complete construction cost estimate plus a 100-year maintenance forecast, built to the exacting standards of a client that uses the numbers to commit public funds.

When every variable matters and the calculations drive real appropriations, approximate isn't acceptable.

Workforce reentry — where technology meets human stakes

For the Center for Employment Opportunities, one of the country's leading workforce reentry organizations serving formerly incarcerated individuals, we served as internal technology leadership — building and managing the full platform that ran their programs. The work is covered in depth in our Nonprofit & Social Impact section, but it belongs here too: this was government-adjacent work in the most direct sense, serving a population with no safety net and funders demanding rigorous outcome measurement.

The continuous employment metric we built — tracking whether participants maintained employment with no more than a three-month gap — required custom logic that standard reporting tools couldn't produce. Government and government-adjacent funders don't accept "our software can't calculate that" as an answer.

What government work actually requires

Public sector engagements demand things that commercial projects sometimes let slide: auditability, accessibility, security posture, and documentation rigorous enough to survive staff turnover and public scrutiny. Shortcuts that might be acceptable in a startup context aren't acceptable here. We've worked inside those constraints long enough that they're not friction — they're just how we build.