Kristen Smith 
- Graviss was the State Department’s first chief data and AI officer
- He most recently served as Atlassian’s public sector CTO
- Tyler Harding was appointed as director of public sector security and compliance
Blitzy has hired Matthew Graviss, the executive who served as the Department of State’s first chief data and artificial intelligence officer, as field chief technology officer for public sector.
Graviss announced the move in a LinkedIn post last week. He joined Blitzy from Atlassian, where he spent nearly two years as chief technology officer for public sector.
Blitzy also brought on Tyler Harding as director of public sector security and compliance. Both executives assumed their new roles in October, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Who Is Matthew Graviss?
Graviss spent nearly two decades in government before moving to industry. As CDAO, he led the State Department’s Center for Analytics from December 2020 until February 2025, overseeing enterprise AI strategy, data governance, and modernization efforts. He was also a key player in developing an AI marketplace designed to deliver approved AI software to departmental bureaus.
Graviss was also appointed chief data officer at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, director of security threat assessment operations at the Transportation Security Administration, and director of a Customs and Border Protection division that evaluated commercial border surveillance technology. He began his federal career in 2007 as a program manager in the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office at the Department of Homeland Security.
Graviss sits on the Atlantic Council’s GeoTech Commission on AI and the advisory council of Purdue’s Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy. He holds a doctorate in systems engineering from George Washington University, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Auburn University.
Who Is Tyler Harding?
Harding comes from the office of the Department of War’s chief information officer, where he spent over two years as a senior technical adviser and identity, credential and access management, or ICAM, program manager. He led department-wide efforts on automated account management and the shift toward attribute-based access control, managing a team across international, internal, interoperability and internal controls workstreams, according to his LinkedIn profile. He also designed the department’s ICAM strategic plan and a five-year funding model and stood up the CIO office’s first internal control program with reviews across eight ICAM service providers.
Before that, he spent nearly three years at Amazon in security and compliance roles covering Amazon Business and its distribution and fulfillment operations, and two years as a Department of War security and compliance program manager at Amazon Web Services. His earlier career included seven years at Kearney & Company leading a cybersecurity practice, six years at KPMG managing federal IT audit engagements, and roles at IBM Global Services and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
The two hires followed Jim Young’s arrival in September as regional vice president for public sector. He most recently served as senior manager for joint Department of Defense sales at AWS. Before that, Young spent more than nine years at Google as its Defense Department sales manager.
What Is Blitzy?
Blitzy is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It builds an agentic AI platform for enterprise software development designed to generate code and work with existing codebases.
The company said its platform produces roughly 80 percent of a software road map autonomously, with human engineers completing the remainder. The company was founded in 2023 by CEO Brian Elliott, a former Army Ranger and West Point graduate, and CTO Sid Pardeshi, who spent more than seven years at NVIDIA.
