Christa Hartsock is an engineering leader with 12 years of experience building and managing mission-driven software teams across civic tech and privacy-focused organizations. Currently Associate Director of Engineering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation after a fast promotion from Engineering Manager, she combines hands-on backend expertise with product-minded leadership. Her career includes senior technical and management roles at Code for America, 18F, Meedan, and consulting work through topographic, demonstrating a strong track record in public-interest technology and qualitative research-informed engineering. Christa brings a practical, systems-oriented approach to scaling teams and shipping reliable backend systems while keeping user trust and ethics central to technical decisions. Trained in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, she pairs a humanities perspective with technical fluency—helping translate complex social problems into pragmatic engineering solutions. Colleagues describe her as a strategic operator who moves comfortably between code, strategy, and stakeholder engagement.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
A.B. Cum Laude History of Art and Architecture, A.B. Cum Laude History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University
A Rails gem with base styles and Javascript for Code for America products
Contributions:2 reviews, 130 commits, 99 PRs in 2 years 10 months
ruby-on-railsamericarailsjavascriptruby
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.