About us
About OceanDisc
OceanDisc LLC is an engineering firm led by John Lyons and Kevin Ross, working with senior engineers and specialists the firm has built systems with for years. We've been building government software since 2013 - federal systems, international program platforms, and two commercial products, much of it still in production today. The details are on our work page.
How we work
Clients hire us directly to take on full engagements, discovery through years of ongoing support, and we also work as the engineering team inside larger programs, building and operating systems for the prime or delivery firm running them. Either way, software only earns its keep by staying in service, and some of our client relationships are more than a decade old.
Within any engagement we can handle the full lifecycle: design, build, data migration, integration, and the years of iterative development that follow launch. Programs change as they go, so staying close to the people who use what we build is how we keep the software fitting the job.
AI is part of our toolkit now, in data processing and decision support, and we are deliberate about where it belongs. This sector has produced a lot of demos that died on contact with a real workflow. Part of what you hire us for is knowing the difference before it costs you.
Sectors
- Defense knowledge management
- Federal civilian & acquisition systems
- Public lands & recreation data
- Humanitarian response & stabilization
- Third-party & trust-fund monitoring
- Monitoring, evaluation & learning
- Education & scholarship management
- Health & development finance
- Natural resource governance
- Anti-corruption & public integrity
Leadership
John Lyons
Managing Director
John co-founded OceanDisc and oversees operations and program delivery. A strategic program and technology leader with more than 20 years delivering data-driven platforms across government, defense, and international development, he specializes in integrating monitoring, evaluation & learning (MEL) frameworks with scalable engineering systems, so the platforms OceanDisc builds measurably improve decision-making and program performance at global scale.
Kevin Ross
Technical Director
Kevin co-founded OceanDisc and leads its engineering practice, serving as lead engineer and product owner on enterprise knowledge-management and monitoring platforms for U.S. federal, allied-government, and international clients, many of them fielded in active crisis-response and stabilization contexts. He works hands-on across the stack, from architecture and cloud infrastructure to databases, APIs, and frontends, while leading the development teams behind them.
The partners work with a group of senior engineers and specialists they've built systems with for years, sized to each program.
Domain-first
We learn the mandate, the constraints, and the people before we write code. The software has to fit the way an agency actually operates, not the way a vendor wishes it did.
Security & compliance
Access control, audit trails, and data protection are design inputs, not launch-week patches. We build for Section 508, GDPR, and the event log that proves it.
Long-term partnership
Our longest client relationships have passed ten years of continuous development. We build systems that can be maintained, then stay and maintain them.
Technical expertise
Some of the technologies we use to build secure, maintainable systems for our clients.
Want to talk to the people who'd do the work?