Senior Director of Engineering. I lead teams, write code, and build public-interest software.
At Coforma, I lead a 23-person engineering structure with six direct reports, including engineering managers and directors, and own the company-wide healthcare engineering portfolio. I also stay hands-on as engineering lead and principal engineer for MyCareer.NJ.gov, a bilingual statewide workforce platform used by about 1.7 million New Jersey residents. I stay close to architecture, accessibility, reliability, and the people doing the work.
I've spent the last decade building civic technology. Much of that work is unglamorous but important: turning policy into software, fixing messy data, making public services accessible, and keeping them secure and reliable. I also work on open data standards, including CTDL for workforce credentials and FHIR for health data.
Before Coforma, I built public systems inside California government at the Department of Social Services, Energy Commission, and Public Utilities Commission, and led application development at UC Berkeley.
Based in Davis, California · Portfolio · LinkedIn
Most projects here are betas or reference implementations. They are not proof of production use or adoption. Each README says what works, what does not, and what still needs human review.
- Transit Delivery Atlas. A close, source-linked reading of California Executive Order N-7-26. The signed order, my analysis, and unanswered questions are kept separate. Explore the atlas.
- GTFS Scorecard. Live, plain-language quality scorecards for 1,100+ U.S. and Canadian GTFS feeds, with GTFS-Realtime monitoring where available, a fail-closed CI gate, and a read-only MCP server. Visit gtfsscorecard.org.
- tods-validate. A published TODS v1.0–v2.1 validator for the CLI, GitHub Actions, pre-commit, browser, Docker, and LSP workflows. It includes auto-fix, GTFS drift diagnostics, and a merged upstream standards correction.
- Fare Policy Assistant. A reduced-fare reference assistant for five California transit agencies. It answers in English and Spanish, cites dated sources, and explains policy without deciding whether someone qualifies. The repo includes a public 201-case evaluation and a separate black-box audit.
- NearMiss. The live Conflict Atlas combines reviewed 2020–2024 NHTSA FARS evidence for all 50 states and D.C. with open tools for statistically honest road-hazard and near-miss analysis. It normalizes by exposure, reports uncertainty, and uses real hotspot statistics instead of treating a heat map as proof. Explore the atlas.
- Sprout. An in-build, offline-first plant-care reference assistant whose evaluation harness is the headline artifact. It measures groundedness, toxicity safety, calibrated uncertainty, and English/Spanish parity; the deterministic public reference answers only from a versioned, cited corpus and runs locally in the browser.
- constituent-reconciler. An offline-first nonprofit record-resolution pipeline with OCR, probabilistic matching, consent-aware exports, and a human review gate so uncertain records never merge silently.
- outcome-receipts. Draft funder reports where every figure is reproducible from deterministic SQL and unsupported narrative claims are stopped by a fail-closed grounding gate.
- habitable. A working alpha reference implementation for tenant unions to keep encrypted habitability records with RFC 3161 timestamps, chain of custody, peer-to-peer sync, a bilingual local web app, and independently verifiable packets. There is no central store of tenants' personal data. It has not had an independent security or legal review or a real tenant-union pilot, so do not rely on it in a real legal matter yet.
- ledger. A private community archive for queer history and mutual-aid knowledge. It uses established preservation formats, and contributors choose what is public, community-only, or sealed.
- Swelter. A maintained reference implementation for neighborhood heat and air-quality sensing, with calibration, accessible bilingual maps and alerts, and OGC SensorThings export. Its live demo uses current Copernicus data for 337 California cities and physical low-cost sensors in Stuttgart, with source and provisional-data limits shown on screen.
- Davis Bike Hazard Map. A private-beta, offline-first cycling-hazard PWA with privacy-preserving photo intake, safer routing, saved-route alerts, moderation, and handoff to the city's 311 system.
- Family Greenhouse. A React and TypeScript household plant-care PWA with Capacitor mobile shells and a serverless AWS backend. Commercial activity is on hold: it remains a technical demonstration and is not accepting new registrations or payments, offering paid plans, conducting launch activity, or doing customer outreach.
- Personal tools that keep their data local: Olive Bark Logger and Queer the Stacks.
- This site: chelseakr.com is bilingual and tests against WCAG 2.2 AAA criteria in CI. Manual assistive-technology review and external conformance review remain separate human gates.
There is also a TODS fork I use for upstream standards work. Browse every public repository.
- I won't work on weapons or warfare, policing or mass surveillance, or technology that profits from incarceration. I also won't work with organizations based in, or strongly tied to, Israel.
- I look for organizations whose work helps people routinely failed by public systems, and whose leadership reflects the communities they serve.
- I won't use AI to decide whether someone gets a job, benefit, service, or opportunity. It can help a person make a decision, but that person should be able to see the evidence, correct bad information, and make the final call.
- I collect as little personal data as I can. I prefer local and offline tools when they are practical, and I want people to choose what they share.
- I show sources, calculations, and my own interpretation separately. When a system does not know something, it should say so.
I spend most days in Python, TypeScript, React, AWS, and data systems. I like clear boundaries, useful logs, known-answer tests, and checks that stop when they cannot prove the result. Privacy, accessibility, and operations are part of the first design, not a cleanup pass.
AI agents are part of my development workflow. I choose the architecture, write the acceptance criteria, review the output, and decide whether it is ready to release. Legal, policy, subject-matter, and manual accessibility reviews are done by people.
I'm interested in W-2 engineering people-management roles—VP, Head of Engineering, Director, or Senior/Principal Engineering Manager—where I can lead people and managers, stay close to the architecture, and build reliable, accessible public-interest technology. My strongest domains are energy and utilities, public health, workforce systems, social services, and responsible AI.
Reach me through chelseakr.com or LinkedIn.
My portfolio repositories are developed against a shared set of engineering standards. This repository is documentation only — a profile README — so most of those standards do not apply here; they apply (and are declared) in the individual project repositories linked above.
| Standard | Status |
|---|---|
| Responsible-Tech Framework | Applies — the "What I will and won't work on" section above is the load-bearing statement; claims about projects are kept honest and dated |
| Code Quality | N/A — README-only profile repository; no executable source or dependency graph |
| Security & Supply-Chain | N/A — README-only profile repository; no executable or deployable supply-chain surface (reporting channel in SECURITY.md) |
| CI/CD | N/A — GitHub-rendered profile README; no build, deployment, or versioned artifact |
| Observability | N/A — no runtime service or application surface |
| Accessibility | N/A — no owned HTML surface; content is rendered by GitHub |
| Internationalization | N/A — personal profile content, not a civic/public-service user workflow (see docs/I18N.md) |
| AI Evaluation | N/A — no LLM/model component |
| Documentation | Applies — this README, CHANGELOG.md, SECURITY.md, and the ADR log in docs/adr/ |
| Quality & Metrics | N/A — no executable product or service metrics |
| Release & Versioning | N/A — no versioned artifact is released from the profile repository (see ADR 0001) |
CITATION.cff — N/A (profile README; nothing citable). Prose checks run via make verify
(markdownlint) and the matching pre-commit hook.



