Adam Richie-Halford
Engineering Leader · Ed-Tech Platforms at Scale · Director of Technology, Stanford ROAR
Engineering leader who runs the team and the platform behind ROAR at Stanford — a research-grade reading-assessment system used by 309 K-12 school districts, 2,700+ schools, and 160K+ students with 870K+ assessment runs. I build the architecture, the engineering practice, and the data and safety controls that turn peer-reviewed science into software districts can rely on. Hands-on builder (Nature Methods, SciPy, JOSS) who treats AI as a force multiplier across the engineering lifecycle and ships AI features in production with the QA, evaluation, and safety bar that working in K-12 demands.
Experience
Director of Technology & Innovation — Stanford University — ROAR / Graduate School of Education
- Built the engineering org from one to six and scaled ROAR from a research prototype to a platform serving 309 K-12 districts, 2,708 schools, and 160K+ students with 873K+ assessment runs to date.
- Stay hands-on on the critical path: ship code, drive incidents, and pair with engineers on hard problems while owning roadmap, hiring, and operating cadence (sprint planning, technical reviews, release, delivery reporting).
- Rolled out AI-accelerated engineering across the team — coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot), AI code review on every PR, generative tests on highest-risk paths — and built the eval/QA/safety harness for AI-powered tutor and learner features shipped in partnership with Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Ai2/Allen Institute for AI.
- Technical owner for data governance, privacy, and user safety on a K-12 platform: system-of-record decisions, retention/deletion, least-privilege access, vendor security review, and FERPA-aligned controls on student PII.
- Stood up the engineering foundations — monitoring, audit logging, error tracking, CI/CD, environment management, on-call — that turned a research codebase into something districts trust for daily classroom use.
- Leading a multi-stage platform modernization onto a TypeScript Vue front-end, Express services, and Postgres with FGA-based authorization — moving fragile research-era logic into explicit, testable services aligned to the user journey (rostering → assignment → assessment delivery → reporting) and de-risking the migration of 800K+ historical assessment runs without a single integrity incident.
- Run the technology budget and the vendor stack; partner directly with Product, research PIs, and district stakeholders to translate ambiguous organizational priorities into shippable scope.
Postdoctoral Scholar & Software Engineer — ROAR — Stanford University — Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics
- Built browser-based, validated reading assessments — the engineering foundation of what later became the ROAR platform I now lead. TypeScript front-end, Python data pipelines, hand-tuned for cross-device delivery in real classrooms.
Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow & Open-Source Maintainer — University of Washington — eScience Institute
- Designed APIs, shipped releases, and ran the user community for production-grade open-source software used by labs worldwide — pyAFQ (Nature Methods), Groupyr (JOSS), AFQ-Insight (PLOS Computational Biology), Cloudknot (SciPy 2018). Reviewed external PRs, triaged production-grade issues, and owned the release pipeline.
Graduate Research Assistant — DOE Computational Science Fellow — University of Washington — Department of Physics
- PhD in computational physics on a DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship; ran Monte Carlo simulations on world-class supercomputers; lead-author result published in Physical Review Letters. Founding president of the UW Research Computing Club ($1M+ in shared compute) and member of the UW Hyak HPC Governance Board.
Rural Health Educator — United States Peace Corps — Kingdom of Morocco
- Designed and managed federally funded youth-health-education projects in rural schools; co-organized Morocco's first national English spelling bee with local educators and a U.S. embassy program.
Visiting Scientist — NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory — Communications Ground Systems
- Pioneered a new space-weather measurement technique from Cassini radio-scintillation data; received the AFA General Phillips Award for Outstanding Young Scientist of the Year.
Officer / Systems Engineer & Lead Space Systems Analyst — United States Air Force — Space and Missile Systems Center
- Led the technology investment plan linking a $2.4B lab budget to a $12B satellite R&D portfolio, aligning a 21-person cross-functional group of contractors, civilians, and Air Force officers around shared priorities; later program-managed an $8M software platform used by 75+ DoD and industry users.
Selected Projects
ROAR — Rapid Online Assessment of Reading — Platform I lead at Stanford. Browser-based, validated assessments for K-12 reading skills deployed in 309 districts with 870K+ runs and FERPA-grade data handling. Research–practice partnership with Stanford Accelerator for Learning and Ai2.
pyAFQ — Automated Fiber Quantification — Open-source neuroimaging analysis library; co-developer; used by labs worldwide. Published in Nature Methods.
Cloudknot — Python library that lets researchers run existing code on AWS Batch with minimal config. Created and maintain. Published at SciPy 2018.
Groupyr — Sparse group lasso for high-dimensional ML, scikit-learn compatible. Lead developer. Published in JOSS.
Skills
Engineering Leadership Hiring & team building, technical roadmapping, sprint operations, incident response, vendor management, cross-functional partnership with Product/Research/Operations
AI-Accelerated Engineering Coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot), generative testing, AI code review, evaluation harnesses, prompt-engineering for production systems, AI safety/QA practices
Platforms & Infrastructure Cloud architecture (AWS), CI/CD, monitoring & observability, Postgres, REST/serverless APIs, browser-based application delivery, performance optimization
Data, Privacy & Safety FERPA-aligned controls, PII governance, least-privilege access, audit logging, retention/deletion, vendor security review, K-12 platform safety workflows
Languages Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, SQL, Bash
Education
PhD, Physics, University of Washington, Seattle — DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellow. Thesis: Quantum Monte Carlo Studies of the BCS-BEC Crossover.
MS, Physics, California State University, Long Beach
BS, Engineering Physics, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University — Summa Cum Laude. Minor in Mathematics.
Honors: DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (2013–17) · UW Data Science Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020) · AWS Cloud Credits for Research ($40K total, 2022 + 2016) · AFA General Phillips Award — Outstanding Young Scientist (2009).