Bloom Works Welcomes Jeff Maher, Director of Engineering

If there’s a stereotype about public interest technologists being nice, thoughtful, humble people, then Jeff Maher is the poster child for that perception.

In February 2022, Bloom Works announced that Jeff had been named its new Director of Engineering. Already an influential presence in the public interest technology space, Jeff came to Bloom from the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), where he had served in a number of leadership capacities since 2019.

A native of the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania, Jeff grew up interested in video games and went on to major in computer science with a minor in journalism at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). At the time, Jeff wasn't sure if his talents would best be applied toward reporting the news or building technology tools, but his exposure to both worlds gave him a better sense for where he'd have the best impact.

"I remember thinking, oh my gosh, there are fewer people who can write user centered code than who can write newspapers," Jeff remembers of his decision.

After graduating from RIT, Jeff worked in private industry software development for 7 years in the Philadelphia region. He tackled financial and healthcare technology projects, and got his first taste of public interest technology as a volunteer web developer for the PACDC and Code for Philly , where he created a prototype vacant land tracker using open data from the City's water department and crowd sourced data.

It was during a technology conference that Jeff first encountered the national effort to improve government digital services known as Code for America (CfA). He remembers approaching a table at the tech conference that wasn't receiving many visitors and displayed only a single American flag. After a brief conversation about CfA and its altruistic mission, Jeff was sold and applied several times before becoming a CfA Fellow in 2014.

"The Code for America fellowship assignment was basically, 'you have 11 months, make something better,'" said Jeff.

In 2014 Jeff was assigned to the state of Rhode Island, where he worked with the state on education initiatives and helped establish its volunteer chapter of Code for America. His projects as a fellow were two online registration systems, one for K-12 students and another for the free Pre-K lottery. The impact of this project was remarkable, being included in a funding request for $19 million in funding from the US Department of Education for Pre-K expansion. The system enabled Rhode Island to triple its number of free preschool seats in the state without increasing registration administrative costs.

"I see my career mission as reducing suffering," he said. "In Rhode Island we built trust with the community, because if you don’t have people who look like the people you serve, things won’t work for them."

The following year, Jeff became one of the founding members of the United States Digital Service’s (USDS) Veterans Affairs team, a newly formed technology organization within the Executive Office of the President of the United States, tasked with improving federal websites and digital services. It was in his USDS role on the Veteran Affairs website team that Jeff met Emily Wright-Moore , one of the founders of Bloom Works. The two did many discovery sprints and eventually led work to build a website (Vets.gov, now VA.gov)? that could help veterans discover, apply for, and manage VA benefits.

"I’m good at spotting people who inspire me and trying to learn from them," Jeff said. "I remember thinking that Lauren was a person I wanted to work with and learn from."

Jeff would later intersect with Bloom founder Lauren Lockwood in research environments before watching her speak at a Code for America Summit. When he learned that Emily and Lauren had teamed up to create a digital services company, he was thrilled to see them bring a mix of intelligent, nuanced, and simple solutions to social service problems.

From 2019 to 2022, Jeff served in a number of capacities at the Canadian Digital Service, where he led a group of more than 60 people and the areas of design, design research, product management, and software development. He helped practitioners learn how to collaborate and find a more nuanced view of the tools they were building.

"Wherever you can reduce needless ambiguity, that helps. I like to think that I help surface unconscious bias and deepen perspectives on problems."

In his new role at Bloom, Jeff oversees a team of engineers and their respective portfolios of projects, as well as directly working on projects. He looks forward to helping Bloom focus on outcome areas by guiding actions and outputs on defined and agreed upon outcomes.

"Bloom is more discerning than most digital companies about what it works on, it really is a different breed of organization." Jeff said. "When you put DEI at your core, you're able to design products with and for people who truly look like America."

Follow Jeff on Twitter: @plusjeff