Ian Steenstra, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, Head Of AI Research & Engineering at One Small Step
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolIan Steenstra, Ph.D. is a research scientist and engineer with eight years of experience building safe, clinically grounded AI for mental health and consumer-scale distributed systems. As Co-Founder and Head of AI Research & Engineering at One Small Step, he leads development of reliable generative-agent interventions informed by his PhD work at Northeastern, where he clinically validated counseling agents and won Best Paper at ACM IVA 2024. He combines production engineering chops from Wayfair—migrating monoliths to GCP and architecting high-throughput notification services—with research strengths in multi-agent simulation, cognitive-affective modeling, and adversarial safety testing. Based in Boston, he bridges rigorous human-subject experimentation and scalable ML engineering to deliver therapeutic AI that is both safe and operational. An unusual thread in his career is translating lab-validated agent behaviors directly into deployable systems that have undergone stress-testing against high-risk inputs.
8 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
High School Diploma, High School Diploma at Barnstable High SchoolDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Computer Science at Northeastern UniversityBachelor of Science - BS Computer & Systems Engineering, Bachelor of Science - BS Computer & Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (16)
anonymous10
chat-application9
chat8
monitor8
sounds7
alarm5
django5
closed5
appengine4
computer-vision4
python4
web-application4
html3
data-visualization2
visualization2
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
IanSteenstra/PeerSupport
Jan 2020 - Nov 2021
Anonymous peer support chat application with the ability to flag risky messages to allow admins to monitor the safety of the private discussions
Contributions:166 commits, 41 PRs, 158 pushes in 1 year 10 months
monitorsupport-chatchat-applicationchatability
IanSteenstra/iansteenstra.github.io
Nov 2021 - Oct 2022
Contributions:10 commits, 8 PRs, 47 pushes in 1 year
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.