MATT
ZAGAJA

Software architect, attorney,
and civic technologist.

I'm a Software Architect at TED, building the backend systems that power one of the world's most-watched video platforms. I work primarily in Ruby on Rails and care about shipping software that's fast, reliable, and built to last.

Before TED, I was a Ford Foundation and Mozilla fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where I worked on the Lumen Database — the world's largest archive of online content removal requests — and mentored two Google Summer of Code students. Earlier, as Lead Web Developer at MAPC (the Metropolitan Area Planning Council), I built geospatial planning tools using PostGIS, Esri vector tile services, Mapbox, and shapefile pipelines.

My background is genuinely unusual: JD from UConn Law with a focus on Intellectual Property, years in Connecticut politics as a Deputy Data Director and campaign manager, and a career that found its fullest expression in code. I lead engineering for Code for Boston, write regularly about technology and its social implications, and care deeply about software that serves democracy, equity, and the public good.