DEV.co
Sacramento, CA · Custom Software + AI

Custom software for Sacramento — built the AI-native way.

We pair senior engineers with an AI-accelerated delivery model to ship custom software for Sacramento's state-government, healthcare, and clean-energy operators — without the fragile output that gives AI a bad name.

Senior-only engineering · AI-accelerated delivery · you own 100% of the code

AI changed the economics of custom software. We rebuilt our process around it.

Sacramento is California's state-government, govtech, and public-sector software hub — anchored by state agencies, the broader CalHHS and DMV-modernization ecosystems, and a growing healthcare and clean-energy engineering scene. Senior hires are six figures, months out, and picked over by state agencies, systems integrators, and the venture-backed challengers around them. AI changes the math, but only when senior people own the parts AI gets wrong.

On a Sacramento govtech, healthcare, or clean-energy build, AI is fast for the repetitive 70% — schemas, scaffolding, CRUD, dashboards, glue. The 30% AI gets confidently wrong is the part state procurement, CalHHS, or your compliance lead will catch: accessibility (Section 508 / WCAG) regressions, audit trails missing for an authentication event, public-records-act exposure, and integration with bespoke state systems AI invents instead of reads. Raw AI output ships those silently.

We build for Sacramento operators — state-agency modernization projects shipping into procurement milestones, healthcare and provider tools across the Central Valley, clean-energy and grid-tech platforms, B2B SaaS shipping into government and public-sector buyers, and modernization of decades-old enterprise stacks. Our model: AI handles scaffolding and the repetitive 70%; a senior engineer owns architecture, security review, and signs off on every change.

Show, don't tell

AI writes the first draft. A senior engineer signs off.

Every change runs through review for security, tests, and architecture before it ships — that review is the product.

delivery.tstypescript
const draft = await ai.generate(spec)          // minutes, not daysreview(draft, { security: true, tests: true, architecture: true })// ✗ rejected: form lacks keyboard-trap-free focus management (Section 508 miss) → focus order + accessibility test// ✓ merged: audit-logged authentication event with correlation id, public-records-friendly data-export endpoint
Every change
AI velocity + human judgment
tests + security review built in
you own 100% of the result

On a Sacramento govtech build, the failure modes are accessibility regressions, missing auth audit trails, and public-records-act gaps. Senior review catches them before a state assessor or an accessibility audit does.

What we build for Sacramento companies.

Public Sector

GovTech & FedRAMP-ready apps

Citizen-facing services and internal systems built for procurement, accessibility, and audit.

Healthcare

Healthcare & HIPAA-ready apps

Patient-facing portals, clinician tools, and care-coordination platforms built to HIPAA from day one.

Product

SaaS platforms

Multi-tenant products with auth, billing, and dashboards — MVP to scale.

Modernize

Modernization

Move legacy systems onto a modern, maintainable stack — incrementally, no big-bang.

AI

AI applications

Copilots, RAG, search, and agents grounded in your data, with guardrails and evals.

Internal

Internal tools & copilots

Operations tooling that replaces the spreadsheet-and-tribal-knowledge workflow.

Senior, on-shore, AI-accelerated

A senior team that moves at AI speed.

You work with senior engineers in Pacific Time who own architecture, accessibility, and regulated-environment quality — fitting into a downtown Sacramento procurement team, an east-side healthcare standup, or a Roseville SaaS PR review — not a junior pool with raw AI output bolted on.

Sacramento's senior engineering pool is split between state agencies, systems integrators, healthcare networks, and a smaller venture-backed bench — three-to-six months to hire and steadily poached by Bay Area remote roles. An AI-native team gets you shipping this week, flexes monthly, and doesn't need a Capitol-area office.

Talk to an engineer

Traditional Sacramento dev shop vs. AI-native.

Traditional AgencyDEV.co (AI-native)
Time to working softwareMonthsDays to weeks
CostFull senior rates, all hoursLower — AI removes the rote work
Code qualityGood (if senior)Same bar — every change reviewed
AI riskContained by senior review + tests
You own the codeUsuallyAlways — full repo on day one
Scales with youSlow to staff upFlex up or down monthly
2–3×
faster than traditional development
1 wk
to a working prototype
100%
code ownership at handoff
30 days
post-launch support included

Common questions from Sacramento teams.

Do you work with Sacramento companies?
Yes — we serve Sacramento, Stockton, and Oakland companies with senior, on-shore engineers in Pacific Time. Most collaboration is remote-first, with on-site available for kickoffs and key milestones.
Do you build to Section 508 / WCAG 2.2 AA?
Yes — accessibility is part of every component we ship, not an audit at the end. We test for keyboard, screen-reader, and reduced-motion scenarios as part of CI, extend your design system rather than creating one-offs, and produce VPATs (or VPAT-ready evidence) when the procurement requires it.
Can you work with state procurement, ATO, and modernization programs?
Yes. We've shipped into procurement-driven environments where every change is documented and every release is reviewed. We support the documentation your security and procurement leads need without making it the project's bottleneck.
Is AI-built software production-ready?
Yes — when a senior engineer reviews every output, adds tests, and hardens it. The horror stories come from shipping raw AI code unsupervised. We don't, and we support what we ship.
Will we own the code?
100%, from day one. We deliver to a repository you control — no proprietary platform, no lock-in.
How fast can we start?
Usually within days. A short scoping call defines the build, the timeline, and a fixed quote.
Can you work with our existing team?
Yes — we augment in-house teams, review their work, and set standards, or run the build end to end. We flex to how you work.

Let's build it — Sacramento.

Tell us what you're shipping. We'll give you a senior engineer's read, an honest timeline, a fixed quote, and tell you whether AI-native is the right fit for your build.