Public-safety systems for California's caregivers and care facilities
Role: Software engineer (individual contributor) · 2016–2019
- caregivers in the public registry
- 170,000+
- licensed facilities served
- 140,000+
- plus DOJ/FBI Live Scan and PII protection
- 2FA
- compliant fee-payment portal
- PCI-DSS
At the California Department of Social Services, Chelsea was a software engineer on systems where a mistake has real consequences. A family deciding who to trust with a loved one's care. The state's ability to confirm who is fit to provide it. This was hands-on individual-contributor work on public-safety and social-services software, the careful, security-minded kind, on systems that had to be correct and stay up because people were counting on them.
A public registry families can verify
Chelsea built and operated California's public Home Care Aide Registry, created under AB 1217, which lets families look up any of the 170,000-plus caregivers listed in it. A registry only works if people can believe what it tells them, so the engineering came down to integrity and protection: two-factor authentication, integration with DOJ and FBI Live Scan background checks, careful handling of personally identifiable information, and online payment for registration. The point was a system a family could check before letting someone into their home, and have reason to trust the answer.
Background checks against DOJ and FBI records
Chelsea also extended a .NET background-check application that worked with DOJ and FBI RAP sheets and the state's Child Abuse Central Index (CACI). The data is sensitive and the outcomes carry weight, so precision was the whole job: accurate matching, tight access controls, and reliability in moments when a wrong or missing record matters. The right answer had to come through every time.
Payments at scale, bridged to legacy systems
On the facilities side, Chelsea built a PCI-DSS-compliant fee-payment portal serving more than 140,000 licensed facilities. Handling card payments at that scale means clearing the security and compliance bar for card data. Doing it on top of older infrastructure is the harder part. The portal bridged a legacy Natural/ADABAS mainframe, wiring modern, secure payment flows into the system of record the state already ran on.
Why it matters
- Security and privacy treated as load-bearing requirements: 2FA, DOJ/FBI Live Scan, and careful PII handling on systems people trust with deeply personal decisions
- Correctness when the stakes are real: background-check tooling against DOJ/FBI RAP sheets and CACI, where a wrong record changes someone's life
- Compliant payments bridged to legacy: a PCI-DSS portal for 140,000+ facilities connected to a Natural/ADABAS mainframe
This early government work set a pattern that has held ever since: public systems should be secure, accurate, and worthy of the trust people have no choice but to place in them.