About Ryan Mahoney
I spent eight years at the MBTA, three as an individual contributor and five as Director of Engineering, helping grow the in-house Customer Technology Department from 15 people to 100. The work Iâm proudest of there is making bus crowding data available to riders during COVID so they could assess social distancing risks, turning transit data into public health data. I also supported the teams that built tools like Skate, an operations tool that helps dispatchers actually improve service in real time.
Today I hold four roles: COO of TransitOPS, a non-profit building an open source alternative tech stack for public transit agencies squeezed by private equity owned technology-consolidation-monopolies; co-founder and builder of FirstWho, which removes the friction from high-quality structured interviewing so companies can make better, less biased hiring decisions; Executive Director of the Malden Islamic Center; and Engineering Manager on the Front-End Platform Team at Advisor360.
Iâm probably best known for a talk I gave with Kristin Taylor called âTransit Tech is Civic Techâ about why public transit agencies need to rethink how they build software if they want the public to actually choose transit.
Iâve written two other books (upcoming!): Fakers, about how hiring is broken on both sides, with companies faking rigor and candidates faking with AI, and what to do about it; and Collaborative Innovators, about seven qualities teams need to innovate systematically, not just once. I also recently released an open-source LLM Pipeline Orchestrator.
Before transit, I served as Board Chairman of the New York Chapter of CAIR and sat on the board of the Shabazz Center, the cultural center at the site of Malcolm Xâs assassination. I worked on New York City political campaigns for Robert Jackson and Zead Ramadan. I also worked at start-ups like BetterLesson and agencies like Blue State Digital.
Many moons ago, my first job was working with the folks who built Timothy Learyâs website during the dotcom boom. I attended art college on scholarship and still consider myself an artist although my mediums have changed.
I live in Malden, Massachusetts, with my amazing wife, fearless kids, and I write code every night until I catch myself nodding off and typing the same letter a thousand times.