Marina Nitze

Marina Nitze is a crisis engineer helping organizations solve mission-critical challenges, with a particular focus on improving America’s child welfare system. She is a co-author of Crisis Engineering and Hack Your Bureaucracy and a partner at Layer Aleph. This crisis engineering firm specializes in restoring complex business systems to service.

Marina served as Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs from 2013 to 2017, where she built the first agency United States Digital Service team. Her portfolio included vets.gov, Caseflow, and other modernization efforts. Previously, she served as Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House and as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the U.S. Department of Education as part of the inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows.

Marina is a Fellow at New America’s New Practice Lab, where she leads a 35-state working group on foster care reform through the Child Welfare Playbook. She has been a volunteer Court-Appointed Special Advocate for at-risk foster youth for over 20 years. She serves on the board of Renaissance Philanthropy and advisory boards of the Center for Civic Futures, Foster America, and Think of Us.