Chelsea Kelly-Reif

Engineering leader

Chelsea Kelly-Reif

I lead teams, write code, and build public systems people can trust.

For the last decade, I've turned policy into secure, accessible software across workforce, health, energy, and social services.

See what I've builtTalk with me

Davis, California · Remote / Hybrid

About

I lead engineering teams and still write code.

In my current role, I lead engineering managers and individual contributors delivering public-interest digital services. I stay close to architecture, accessibility, reliability, and team development.

On MyCareer.NJ, I helped lead engineering from an early prototype to a statewide platform, including the data model, recommendation service, interface, and delivery pipeline. Published program figures report reach to 1.7 million New Jersey residents. I also designed a career-coach proof of concept that was never launched to residents.

Before joining a digital-services firm, I built public systems inside California government at Social Services, the Energy Commission, and the Public Utilities Commission. That experience still shapes the work: collect less data, make decisions inspectable, build for accessibility, and keep a person responsible for the result.

See how I keep this site's AI assistant grounded and testable.

What I'm looking for

I'm open to senior engineering leadership and principal-level technical work where public outcomes matter. The title can flex; the work cannot.

The role

  • VP, Head of Engineering, Director, or Senior/Principal Engineering Manager roles where I can lead people and stay close to the architecture.
  • A lateral move or smaller title is fine. I care more about the mission, the team, and whether I can own the work honestly.

Where I want to do it

  • Energy, climate, sustainability, and utilities.
  • Public health and standards-based health-data interoperability.
  • Civic technology, workforce systems, and economic mobility.
  • Social services, public education, and accessible government technology.

If you need an engineering leader who helps people grow and still writes code, I'd like to talk.

Talk with me

Selected work

A few projects that show how I work.

  • MyCareer.NJ: New Jersey's statewide career platform

    I helped take MyCareer.NJ from early prototype to statewide service. The reported 1.7M reach belongs to the platform, not individual career outcomes.

    • Workforce
    • Statewide platform
    • Accessibility
    • Open data

  • A grounded AI career-coach proof of concept

    I built a grounded career-coach prototype for MyCareer.NJ. It never launched to residents, has no outcome data, and cannot guarantee error-free answers.

    • AI
    • Responsible AI
    • Workforce
    • Proof of concept

  • Habitable: tenant evidence without a surveillance honeypot

    I designed and built an independent, local-first alpha for housing-condition evidence: encrypted records, checkable custody, and deliberate sharing without a server-side case database. It is not legal advice or court-ready software.

    • Housing
    • Privacy
    • Local-first
    • Cryptography
    • Accessibility

View all work

Writing

Notes from the work: engineering leadership, accessibility, public systems, and AI people can inspect.

  • The score was the easy part

    I built GTFS Scorecard to turn transit-data findings into repairs. It taught me that civic technology earns trust through explicit judgment, honest unknowns, preserved evidence, and proof that a change reached the source.

  • A new job title does not erase what you built

    A career pivot cannot launder surveillance and military-AI work into moral authority or create a claim on anyone’s trust.

  • There was no maintenance window for becoming myself

    I transitioned while my life and the public systems around me kept running. That experience shaped how I modernize technology and lead people through change without abandoning them.

View all writing

Open source

A curated set of public repositories, grouped by the work they support. Maturity labels describe the evidence available today, not adoption or guaranteed outcomes.

Transit data and public delivery

  • GTFS Scorecard

    Maturity: Live beta · v1.3.0

    Plain-language quality scorecards for more than 1,100 public GTFS feeds, drawn from a curated registry of more than 1,600 feed records concentrated in the United States and Canada with reviewed cohorts across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America. It prioritizes rider-facing fixes, scores realtime only when a usable feed is configured, and publishes a read API, GitHub Action, and read-only MCP server. Feed records are not necessarily distinct agencies.

    • Civic data
    • Public transit
    • GTFS

    Live site (opens in a new tab)Source (opens in a new tab)

  • TODS Validate

    Maturity: Beta · v0.8.0

    A beta validator for TODS 1.0 and 2.1, available as a CLI, GitHub Action, pre-commit hook, browser playground, Docker image, and language server. It explains spec-cited findings, applies conservative automatic fixes, and detects TODS references broken by GTFS changes. Some 2.1-only semantic checks are disclosed and skipped for 1.0, and the VS Code client is not in a marketplace.

    • Transit data
    • Open standards
    • Python

    Live site (opens in a new tab)Source (opens in a new tab)

  • Transit Delivery Atlas

    Maturity: Early public release

    An active, independent crosswalk of California Executive Order N-7-26. It keeps the signed source, selectively reviewed public evidence, and my analysis separate across 21 directive records. It is not an official implementation or compliance dashboard; missing evidence does not show that work did not occur, and analytical relationships are not official ownership or a critical path.

    • Transit policy
    • Source analysis
    • Public delivery

    Live site (opens in a new tab)Source (opens in a new tab)

  • NearMiss

    Maturity: Public beta

    A beta road-safety toolkit and public FARS evidence atlas. The live atlas presents reviewed 2020–2024 NHTSA fatal-crash counts for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., labeled as burden rather than exposure-normalized risk. Separate local workflows use synthetic reports to demonstrate privacy-preserving intake, exposure normalization, uncertainty intervals, and hotspot analysis. Manual screen-reader review remains pending.

    • Road safety
    • Spatial statistics
    • Open data

    Live site (opens in a new tab)Source (opens in a new tab)

Responsible AI and inspectable decisions

  • Fare Policy Assistant

    Maturity: Deployed beta

    A deployed beta evaluation harness around a reduced-fare reference assistant for five California transit agencies. It answers from dated sources and refuses eligibility decisions or personal information. The repository publishes a 201-case white-box benchmark plus a separate black-box audit, including missed representational, refusal, multilingual, and groundedness thresholds. Manual accessibility review and judge calibration remain open.

    • Responsible AI
    • Transit policy
    • Evaluation

    Live site (opens in a new tab)Source (opens in a new tab)

  • Outcome Receipts

    Maturity: Beta · v0.1.0

    A beta nonprofit reporting tool that ties every figure to its SQL, row count, data-slice hash, definition, and timestamp. Its offline default applies example small-cell safeguards, refuses ungrounded numbers, requires named human approval, and emits verifiable bundles. Optional Bedrock drafting is off by default and never supplies figures. The sample suppression policy is not a compliance determination.

    • Evidence
    • Data lineage
    • Fail-closed AI

    Source (opens in a new tab)

  • Constituent Reconciler

    Maturity: Reference implementation

    An offline-first pipeline that turns intake PDFs and spreadsheets into deduplicated constituent records for an existing CRM. A person approves every uncertain match, nothing merges silently, and automated tests enforce privacy rules for domestic-violence records.

    • Civic tech
    • Entity resolution
    • Privacy

    Source (opens in a new tab)

Evidence, rights, and community control

  • Habitable

    Maturity: Working alpha

    A tenant-union reference implementation for encrypted habitability records, trusted timestamps, and verifiable chain-of-custody packets without a central personal-data store. It has not had an independent security or legal review or a real tenant-union pilot, so it should not be relied on in a legal matter yet.

    • Tenant rights
    • Cryptography
    • Local-first

    Live site (opens in a new tab)Source (opens in a new tab)

  • Ledger

    Maturity: Beta reference implementation

    A beta reference implementation for a community-governed archive of queer histories and mutual-aid knowledge, using established preservation formats and revocable consent. Its synthetic test suite is designed to catch identity leaks to unauthorized viewers, but it has not had an independent security or cryptography audit and should not yet hold high-stakes records.

    • Digital preservation
    • Privacy
    • Open standards

    Source (opens in a new tab)

Climate, community data, and product systems

  • Swelter

    Maturity: Reference implementation

    A maintained reference implementation for community-owned heat and air-quality sensing. Its bilingual dashboard shows daily Copernicus model data for 337 California cities and provisional readings from physical, uncalibrated low-cost sensors in Stuttgart. The pipeline keeps raw and calibrated values separate and exports OGC SensorThings data. It is not an established community sensing network, and manual accessibility review remains a separate gate.

    • Climate
    • Open data
    • Python

    Live site (opens in a new tab)Source (opens in a new tab)

  • Family Greenhouse

    Maturity: Technical demonstration

    A React and TypeScript household plant-care PWA with per-plant schedules, shared care logs, mobile shells, and a serverless AWS backend. Commercial activity is on hold: it is not accepting registrations or payments, offering paid plans, or conducting launch activity.

    • Serverless
    • PWA
    • Full-stack

    Live site (opens in a new tab)Source (opens in a new tab)

Browse every public repository (opens in a new tab)

Experience

  1. Apr 2025 – Present

    Remote

    Senior Director of Engineering

    at Coforma

    I lead engineering managers and individual contributors delivering public-interest digital services. I set direction for architecture, delivery, accessibility, security, reliability, and sustainable operations.

    I develop engineering practices for planning, hiring, onboarding, mentoring, career growth, and coordination across programs and disciplines.

    I partner with product, design, research, delivery, security, and government stakeholders to turn policy and program needs into maintainable services.

  2. Mar 2023 – Apr 2025

    Remote

    Director of Engineering

    at Coforma

    I progressed from principal engineer into engineering leadership while remaining hands-on with MyCareer.NJ. I continued guiding its architecture and delivery while establishing clearer ownership, team-development systems, and engineering practices that could support a statewide service.

  3. Sep 2022 – Mar 2023

    Remote

    Principal Software Engineer

    at Coforma

    I joined as a principal engineer for MyCareer.NJ. My work spanned the PostgreSQL schema, a FastAPI recommendation service, the React and Next.js interface, CI/CD, and the engineering standards around the platform. I did that work inside a larger government, research, product, design, and delivery team.

Earlier roles (6)

  1. Jun 2022 – Sep 2022

    Career break

    at Bereavement

    I stepped away from full-time work to care for my mother in her final months and continue my professional education. She shaped my career and made this work possible.

    In memory of Joyce Kelly-Reif (opens in a new tab)

  2. Apr 2022 – May 2022

    Berkeley, California · Hybrid

    Application Development Lead

    at University of California, Berkeley, School of Education

    I led development of the 21CSLA HUB for California's statewide school-leadership academy. The platform gives district, school, and teacher leaders free access to equity-centered learning, coaching, and resources, including support for the state's Universal Prekindergarten rollout.

  3. Aug 2021 – Apr 2022

    Sacramento, California · Remote

    Lead Software Engineer

    at California Energy Commission

    I architected and shipped the Energy Commission's AWS Data Submission Portal for regulatory energy-data submissions and helped lead cloud modernization.

    I also helped maintain MAEDbS, California's public appliance-efficiency certification service.

    I built energy-data pipelines and policy dashboards and worked with petroleum operators, power-plant operators, and commission leaders to make the migration usable in practice.

  4. Feb 2021 – Aug 2021

    Sacramento, California · Remote

    Principal Software Architect

    at California Public Utilities Commission

    I directed work on the Transportation Carrier Portal, a public online licensing service for passenger carriers.

    I also architected eCAP for telecommunications-access claims and broadband-grant payment requests. The commission launched it after my tenure.

  5. Feb 2019 – Feb 2021

    Sacramento, California · On-site

    Lead Software Engineer

    at California Energy Commission

  6. Oct 2016 – Feb 2019

    Sacramento, California · On-site

    Software Engineer

    at California Department of Social Services

    I built out and operated California's public Home Care Aide Registry, including renewal and ongoing-service capabilities.

    I enhanced caregiver background-check workflows and licensing fee-payment services supporting state social-services programs.

    I also supported program systems and analytics across California Health and Human Services.

Press

Outside coverage and recognition of MyCareer.NJ. These links describe the platform and the partnership behind it; they do not imply that every result belongs to one contributor.

Get in touch

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