GovWorx: Head of Realtime Engineering
Head of Realtime Engineering · First Engineering Manager hire. 2026.
GovWorx builds for the public sector, where compliance is the floor, not a feature you ship later. I joined in early 2026 as Head of Realtime Engineering (the first Engineering Manager hire) to build the team and the realtime platform that the next phase of the business depended on.
What I built
- The realtime platform that served time-critical workflows for government customers
- The engineering team itself, including the hiring rubric, the on-call structure, and the early architecture decisions that compound over the following years
Why this seat
After a deliberate, time-bounded pivot to staff-level IC at Old Well Labs (where I went deep on AI-native development practice), returning to engineering leadership at GovWorx made sense for two reasons. First: the work matters. Public-sector software is where compliance and engineering live in the same sentence, and that's the domain I've spent the most years in. Second: building a team from scratch a second time is the kind of thing you only get a few chances to do well, and I wanted another one.
What it became
First-EM work is mostly hiring, picking the first three architectural choices that will be hard to undo, and writing down what "good" looks like before the team has a culture of its own. I set that foundation before moving into the CTO seat at Dexterity Legal.