Stephen is the former Chief Innovation Officer and Budget Director for the City of San José Mayor’s Office, where he served across two mayoral administrations. His half a decade tenure in America’s 12th largest City involved overseeing a $6 billion annual operating budget and passing four consecutive balanced budgets, while designing and scaling civic technology programs that expanded digital access and positioned the city as a national leader in the responsible adoption of Civic Technology and AI. Among these were the Digital Inclusion Fund, a nationally recognized model for closing the digital divide; AI For All, a free public AI literacy program built in partnership with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google; and the GovAI Coalition, which grew to more than 900 public agencies advancing the responsible use of AI in government.

Earlier in his career, Stephen was a residential fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, where he published research on the ethics and regulations of facial recognition and surveillance AI, launched the CoronAtlas Pandemic Relief Dashboard which aggregated more than 2,000 state-specific resources for the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, and organized two sessions of a multidisciplinary social impact bootcamp for Stanford Law, Business, and Engineering students. Before Stanford, he served as the technology legal policy lead at Legal Services of Greater Miami, spearheading initiatives to expand access to legal services and disaster relief, and as a research fellow with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, providing legal expertise at the intersection of technology, privacy, and civil rights.

Stephen is an attorney holding a Juris Doctor (J.D.) with a concentration in the Business of Innovation, Law, and Technology from the University of Miami. He also holds a Bachelor of Science in Legal Studies from the University of Central Florida.