This Week in Public Sector Tech — July 2, 2026

📣 Tech Jobs for Gov— the job board companion to this newsletter — is now open for listings from the whole civic tech ecosystem. Government jobs are always free to post, and details about rates for other types of organizations are at techjobsforgov.com/post-a-job.

🗓️ Openings for August 1:1 navigation conversations. If you’re trying to figure out how to move into civic tech — or what your next move looks like once you’re there — reach out via civicworkstudio.com/contact with what you’re trying to figure out and your LinkedIn. These conversations are confidential. I’ll follow up with availability and rates.

📊 High Floor, Low Ceiling: How Public-Sector Wage Compression Erodes Public Service — Joe Eichenbaum explored the public sector wage gap and what it actually looks like when you dig into it. What he found? A high floor and a low ceiling. He argues that “pay workers more” isn’t necessarily the solution, but that it needs to be targeted, not across-the-board: raise the ceiling where the gap is real, not the whole scale. He also found that government doesn’t trail the market in all fields. Protective service workers (police, firefighters) earn far more than a private sector comparison. But for white-collar, highly educated, digitally skilled workers whose private sector pay has climbed the fastest, government is far behind.

📣 Sarah Tuneberg on Colorado OIT’s restructuring, four weeks in — Colorado’s new CIO released an honest take about the OIT restructuring four weeks in. Her framing: “announcement is not the same as achievement”. The real work is just getting started and happens in the thousands of individual decisions employees and agency partners make, not because leadership said so. She reaches for a maturity model over a dashboard, because a maturity model tells you what someone needs next, not just how they’re doing.

📣 Designing the Human Help That Government Technology Needs in the AI Era — Denise Linn Riedl (former South Bend CIO, now at Partners for Public Good) talked to 75+ government technology leaders, vendors, and funders and heard the same answer over and over: the gap isn't tools, it's people. IT capacity is the ceiling on what agencies can actually deliver, vendor accountability is inconsistent, and every function around technology like HR, procurement, and legal needs to build its own tech fluency, not just defer to IT.

🧩What We Recommend for Building Better Digital Service Teams, Initiatives, and Results — Earlier this year, the Federation of American Scientists and other partners hosted a series of retrospectives on digital services across the country, inviting staff (current and former) who worked on these initiatives to share their experiences. Based on these convenings, they recently shared their recommendations and findings for building better digital service teams and getting results. What they found is worth sitting with: As is, the digital government field cannot scale; and We built digital teams, not services. They end this piece with a series of recommendations by level of government that I know I will be digging further into. I’m excited to hear what others think.

🏛️ How Four States Put People at the Center of Benefits Delivery — Andrés Argüello from the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality recently shared a piece about how states are building people-centered digital benefits. A key finding is that the most consequential investments to delivery better benefits isn’t in the technology itself, but rather in making sure the right people are put in the right place, with the right expertise, in the right positions and with the right authority to make a difference.

🌐 Santi Garces on the infrastructure agentic AI actually requires — Boston’s CIO argues most states lack the basics an agentic future depends on: content management systems, centralized open data, managed API access, and a working identity layer. He and his collaborators are inviting comments on their concept paper on open civic agentic infrastructure.

🪑 The Three-Legged Stool of Government Digital Product Delivery — Chaeny Emanavin, the Deputy State Chief Technology Officer in California, shared a piece build on his vast experience about why government projects can hit every milestone, on time and on budget, and still fail. His main takeaway is that project management alone doesn’t account for whether anyone actually wants to use what got built. He makes the case for product management as a distinct, necessary function alongside project management and scrum masters.

🧾 SNAP Payment Error Rates (FY2025): A Measure of Capacity, Not Fraud — Joël McClurg, the AI Safety Net Resident at Propel, shared his independent analysis of the new state-by-state payment error rates for SNAP that were released on June 24. These error rates now carry financial penalties for states, with some looking at hundreds of millions of dollars, but he calls out that administrative errors and wrongful denial errors (leading to more hunger) are scrutinized on the same scale. He makes the case that the metric mostly tracks administrative bandwidth and how many eligible people a state actually serves, not fraud, while the denial-side error rate, wrongly turning away eligible families, runs nearly four times higher than payment errors and carries no penalty at all.

♿ “You Didn’t Understand What They Meant”: The Hidden Barrier of Cognitive Accessibility — Elham Ali from the Beeck Center shared the first part of a storytelling series about the role of cognitive accessibility in digital government services. Digital accessibility is a complex topic that is often seen as an aside or as one person’s job to think about, but this piece hones in on why the DOJ’s Title II accessibility ruling matters and what the lack of accessibility means in practice.

📝 A Field Guide to Fix Government Forms Is Live — I came across the The Lab @ DC’s practical, reusable guide to diagnosing and fixing government forms. If you’re interested in how to make forms that don’t suck, consider what they share in this guide alongside the lessons from Elham’s accessibility piece above.

📞Virtual: Join InnovateUS for the rest of their summer 2026 series on Reimagining the Public Contact Center. Join on July 8 for Inside the Modernization of High-Volume Call Centers and on July 15 for Helping the Helpers: AI Tools for Frontline Resident Service. Register here.

🎬Virtual: Hear from staff from Alabama and Minnesota about how they are using data to monitor their programs, determine effectiveness and adapt programs over time, including the organizational challenges that come with it. Tuesday, July 14. Register here.

🤝Portland: Join for a reunion of the Portland Digital Corps. Whether you were a member of the previous cohort or just interested in civic tech, meet others who share your interests. Tuesday, July 14. Register here.

📈Virtual: Curious about how data is being used in government? Join Joe Eichenbaum from 17A and Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley for a conversation about implementing performance principles in government, how data was used in violent crime reduction in Dallas and how teams can use data to prioritize what to do when there is limited capacity. Wednesday, July 15. Register here.

🌉SF: The Civic Happy Hour in SF is back! If you’re interested in civic tech or civic engagement, join current and former White House Presidential Innovation Fellows and the U.S. Digital Corps to meet others doing interesting work. The plan is for the event to take place every third Tuesday of the month. Tuesday, July 21. Register here.

🌺NYC: Join AI for Good NYC for their first AI for Good meetup. Meet others in the non-profit and social good space to talk about AI, learn from each other and think about what the social impact community wants and needs from AI. Tuesday, July 21. Register here.

🧗Colorado is continuing to staff up its restructured Office of Information Technology and has openings across fields. This is an exciting opportunity to join an organization leading the way in what the future of government technology can look like. If you missed it, check out their restructuring announcement and my take on it. Open roles (all remote within CO) including Director of Technology, Senior Product Managers, Senior Service Designers, Senior Delivery Managers, Senior Delivery Engineers, Data Architect, Principal Data Operations Engineer.

🔔Philadelphia is hiring for some unique roles in their IT department to help support their work to implement new IT directions throughout the City. Some of the roles currently open include Technology Partnerships & Innovation Manager, Technical Relationship Manager, Product & Services Portfolio Manager and more.

🌳The City of Thousand Oaks recently established an Information Technology Department and are focused on building a modern, service-oriented organization focused on innovation, operational excellence, and delivering value to the community. They have two leadership openings in Data & Delivery and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

🚌 Metro Transit in Minneapolis is hiring an executive Assistant General Manager, Experience and Innovation, to lead customer experience, employee experience and business technology. You’ll function as the chief innovator for the agency, working to improve not only operational efficiency but also customer satisfaction, employee engagement and organizational culture.

🍎 New York City Office of Information Technology is staffing up under the new administration and is hiring for five Senior Product Managers, thirteen Senior Product Engineers, and nine Senior Product Designers.

There are over 230 jobs listed right now at techjobsforgov.com and there are new ones added every day. The newsletter includes a selection of roles currently open.

🍀 User Experience (UX) Designer | Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority | up to $140k (closes July 14)

🍎 Content Manager & Copy Editor: Focus UX/Accessibility | New York State Office of the Attorney General | up to $87k (closes July 10)

🍎 Health Data User Researcher | NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, Bureau of Data Technology & Strategy | up to $126k (closes August 25)

🦀 UX/UI Designer | Federal Student Aid - U.S. Department of Education | up to $173k (closes August 14)

🦀 Performance and Innovation Manager | City of Fairfax, VA | up to $161k (closes July 12)

🐊 Service Integration and Improvement Analyst | Guilford County Government, Integrated Data and Services | up to $87k (closes July 27)

🐊 Service Designer | City of Mobile | up to $75k (closes July 21)

🌦️ Applications and Innovation Analyst | Snohomish County 911 | up to $159k (closes July 7)

🐻 Senior User Research Analyst | Port of San Francisco | up to $169k (closes July 6)

🐻 Innovation Program Manager | County of Marin | up to $152k (closes July 14)

🇺🇲 UX/UI Designer (GS 13) | Federal Student Aid | up to $173k (closes July 30)

🍎 Senior Cloud Architect & Program Manager | The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey | up to $236k

🍎 Innovation Technologist | New York City Department of Design & Construction | up to $106k (closes July 18)

🦀 Product Development Lead, Service Design & Technology | Amtrak | up to $122k

🐊 Portfolio Delivery Manager | State of Louisiana | up to $11k/month (closes July 7)

🐊 Technical Product Analyst | State of South Carolina | up to $120k (closes July 16)

🐻 Portfolio Manager | CA Office of Data and Innovation | up to $166k (closes July 10)

🐻 Portfolio Management & Governance Office Chief | CA Department of Public Health | up to $13k (closes July 3)

💻 Product Manager (InnovateNJ) | New Jersey Innovation Authority | up to $145k

🐊 AI Solutions Delivery Lead | South Carolina Department of Education | up to $134k (closes July 16)

🌽 Director of Digital Transformation and Learning | City of Rochester | up to $170k

🐻 AI and Privacy Senior Analyst - Information Technology Department | City of San Jose | up to $144k (closes July 2)

🍀 Senior Data Engineer | Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services | up to $154k

🍎 Data Engineer | NYC Department of City Planning | up to $112k (closes August 3)

🍎 Director of Applied Data Science and Solutions | NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene | up to $150k (closes August 8)

🍎 Data Engineer | NYC Department of Sanitation | up to $140k (closes August 24)

🔔 Data Scientist | Allegheny County Department of Human Services | up to $120k (closes August 1)

🐊 Senior Data and Governance Analyst | Guilford County Government, Integrated Data and Services | up to $93k (closes July 27)

🌽 Assistant Director of Data and Artificial Intelligence | Metropolitan Airports Commission | up to $203k (closes July 15)

🏔️ Senior Data Analyst | City of Boulder | up to $137k

🐻 Data Engineer, Platform Modernization | CalOptima | up to $160k (closes July 12)

🍎 QA Automation Engineer | NYC Department of Finance | up to $130k

🌽 Analyst for Web Applications | Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget | up to $100k (closes July 15)

🏔️ Lead Web Application and Software Engineer | Colorado Department of Higher Education | up to $93k (closes July 12)

🐻 Modernization Engineering Project Lead | Port of San Francisco | up to $215k (closes July 6)

🍀 Director, Medicaid Platforms & Products - Medicaid Enterprise Systems (MES) | MA Executive Office of Health and Human Services | up to $170k

🍎 Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives | NYC Housing Authority | up to $190k (closes August 8)

🌦️ Chief Information Officer | Washington Department of Ecology | up to $173k (closes July 16)

🐻 Chief Information and Innovation Officer | County of Marin | up to $299k (closes July 7)

🐻 Associate Chief Information Officer | Santa Clara County | up to $365k (closes July 27)

🐻 Assistant Deputy Director, Chief Artificial Intelligence and Security Operations Officer | CA Department of Public Health | up to $14k (closes July 29)

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