[ckozlowski]

I'll second this, and add some more for OP. While most of my experience is in the defense space, there is a lot of public sector work. I've met people who work on projects for United States Geological Survey (HQed in Reston), National Park Service's "Recreation.gov", Small Business Administration, and others. There are a lot of non-profits in the area working various initiatives. Education is big here, and there are a lot of satellite campuses in the area as well.

I spoke at AWS Community Day D.C. last year, and there were a fair number of startups that attended. You can see some of them listed for DevOpsDays here. https://devopsdays.org/events/2022-washington-dc/welcome/

As someone else mentioned, health sector is big as well, and NIH has some big initiatives underway, many using high performance compute. And take a look at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus. It flies under the radar here, but they do some impressive work.

Aerospace has a lot going on, and plenty with geospatial. Not all of it defense driven.

So yeah, seconding the post above. There's a lot of great public good work beyond defense, it should just be noted that it's public sector, so a lot of bureaucratic strings come with that money.