Spencer Kiser

Hello there!

I lead the team that builds and runs the web platform and APIs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The throughline of my career is providing access: getting data out of systems that were never meant to share it, and to the people who need it, inside the museum and out.

At the Met, I spun up the first native app team, helped define the museum’s Open Access initiative, and built the museum’s public API. More recently, the team moved metmuseum.org off an internally hosted CMS and onto a cloud stack and released semantic search on top of the newly rebuilt collection search.

I manage six developers and a QA engineer, and most of what I do is structural: making room for code review, automated testing, and regular, uneventful releases.

Before joining the Met, I was a developer at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), where I built the museum’s first mobile app and was on the team that rebuilt moma.org. My favorite part of the work was getting away from the screen and into the galleries: projects supporting exhibitions and education programs, accessible interfaces for in-gallery kiosks, and prototypes that test new ways to experience the museum.

I came to software through sound design and field recording, and I hold a master’s from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), a technology school in Tisch that values human curiosity and collaboration over tech for tech’s sake.

Outside work I hack on hardware and play in my sound studio.