Public sector and federal

Public sector technology work carries a different set of constraints than commercial software. Procurement rules that shape how an engagement can even start, accessibility obligations that are not optional, and an accountability standard where a system failure is a matter of public record rather than an internal incident. We build for that reality from the outset rather than treating it as red tape layered on top of a commercial build.

We work with agencies across federal, state and local government, along with the nonprofits and mission driven organizations that face similar accessibility and data privacy obligations on considerably smaller budgets. The common thread across both is that the people using these systems, caseworkers, constituents, program administrators, often have no alternative if the software does not work, which raises the bar on reliability well above what a typical commercial product needs to hit.

Legacy modernization is a constant theme. Many agency systems were built decades ago on technology stacks with a shrinking pool of people who can maintain them, and the risk of doing nothing is now frequently higher than the risk of a carefully staged modernization.

Where we help

• Government and constituent facing portal development, from benefits applications to permitting
• Case management systems for social services, licensing and regulatory programmes
• Legacy modernization for agency systems, including staged migration off unsupported platforms
• Financial, procurement and budgeting systems built for public accountability and audit
• Data transparency and open data platform development
• Donation platforms, volunteer management and CRM for nonprofits
• Accessibility remediation and compliant new build development
• Screened technology talent for public sector programmes, including cleared and background checked personnel where required

The regulatory and compliance landscape

Section 508 and WCAG conformance are nonnegotiable design constraints on anything public facing, not a review pass at the end of a build. We design and test for accessibility from wireframe stage, because retrofitting an inaccessible system is consistently more expensive and less complete than building it in from the start.

Federal engagements are frequently shaped by FedRAMP requirements for cloud services and NIST 800 53 control families for the systems themselves. State and local engagements carry their own state specific security and privacy requirements that vary considerably by jurisdiction. We scope the applicable framework at the outset of every engagement rather than assuming a single standard applies everywhere.

Procurement itself is a compliance domain in this sector. Cooperative purchasing vehicles, set aside requirements and public bidding rules shape how an engagement can be structured before a single requirement is written, and we work within whatever procurement framework a given agency operates under.

Where AI and automation are changing the work

Agencies are moving carefully but genuinely on AI. Chatbot assisted constituent services, automated document classification for benefits processing, and predictive models for programme demand planning are all now realistic scopes, provided procurement and legal review sign off on the specific use case, which in public sector work is a real gating step rather than a formality.

Explainability and auditability matter even more here than in commercial contexts. A constituent denied a benefit has a right to understand why, and an AI system that cannot produce a defensible explanation for its output is not a fit for that kind of decision, regardless of how accurate it is in aggregate.

Where we do use AI assisted tooling, such as document intake automation or code assistance for our own engineers, it is scoped and disclosed as part of the engagement, consistent with the transparency expectations that come with public sector work generally.

Platforms and technology

We work across the platforms commonly used by government agencies and the nonprofits that partner with them.

• Salesforce Government Cloud and Nonprofit Cloud
• Microsoft GCC and Azure Government
• ServiceNow
• Drupal and other CMS platforms for constituent portals
• AWS GovCloud
• Case management platforms, custom and off the shelf

How we approach engagements in this space

We combine proven, well understood engineering practices with newer technology deliberately. Agencies generally cannot absorb the risk of an unproven stack for a system constituents depend on, so we favor technology choices with a track record over ones that are simply new.

Accessibility and data privacy are treated as design constraints from the first wireframe, not a compliance review appended before launch, because remediation after the fact is consistently the more expensive and less complete path.

When additional engineering capacity is needed, we prioritize public sector or nonprofit domain experience specifically, since the procurement, reporting and accountability rhythms of this sector differ meaningfully from commercial work, and a person who has worked inside them ramps up faster than one who has not.