Growing an engineering org, and keeping it whole through turbulence

Over roughly three years at Coforma, an 8(a)/SDVOSB civic-tech firm, Chelsea grew the engineering organization she leads from 39 to 53 people. Headcount is the easy number to cite. The harder one is that the org held together, kept growing, and kept delivering high-stakes federal work through a long stretch of company-wide turbulence. This is the leadership side of that story: how it was scaled and held. Not a how-to.

Scale, in concrete terms

Chelsea carries 22 direct reports and sits over a 53-person engineering organization spanning healthcare and workforce work: the CMS Medicaid reporting systems (MDCT) her teams build, and New Jersey's statewide career platform. At that size, leadership stops being about individual heroics. It's about the structure underneath: who reports to whom, how decisions get made, where the load sits, and whether the people doing the work have what they need to keep going.

The growth that matters most is other people's

Under Chelsea's leadership, nine engineers moved into senior and leadership roles, four of them into Director or Principal positions. That isn't a side effect of growth. It's how the growth happened. As the org got bigger, leadership capacity had to grow with it, and most of that capacity came from inside the teams rather than from hiring. New leaders got real scope, real support, and room to lead in their own way.

Holding the line through change

The org grew during a period of company-wide turbulence, the kind of change that usually shows up as attrition and slipped commitments. Here it didn't. Retention held. Delivery held. The teams kept their footing on federal contracts, where a missed beat isn't an internal inconvenience but a public one. Stability through change rarely lands in a metric. You see it as the absence of the failures everyone braced for.

The operating model

What made the scaling and the stability possible is a deliberate way of running teams: trust, psychological safety, and genuine ownership, informed by trauma-informed practice. Day to day, that looks like:

• Trust and ownership pushed down to the people doing the work, so teams can move without waiting on a single decision-maker
• Psychological safety as an operating principle rather than a slogan: the precondition for the honesty that keeps high-stakes systems healthy
• Leadership capacity grown deliberately from within, so the org can scale without leaning on any one person

Why it counts as delivery

An engineering organization is the thing behind the things — the platform serving 1.7 million residents, the federal health-data systems states depend on. None of it ships if the org churns, stalls, or burns out. Scaling from 39 to 53 while promoting nine people and holding retention through turbulence isn't a soft accomplishment next to the engineering. It is the engineering, seen at the level where leadership actually operates.