Aaron Harnly

Aaron Harnly is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Amplify. Aaron has been with the company since October 2015 and in their current role since December 2017. Prior to their current role, they were the VP Engineering from January 2015 to October 2015 and Executive Director, Adaptive Learning Technology from January 2013 to January 2015.

In their role as Executive Director, Aaron led the creation of an adaptive instruction recommendation product for early literacy. Aaron conducted and directed conceptualization, validation, and development of an adaptive early literacy curriculum. Aaron also led product direction and hands-on development of shared services for data analysis and recommendation. Under their leadership, the team achieved deployment times of minutes, compared to days or weeks with existing technologies and policies. In addition, the configurable services allowed time-to-market of targeted features of days-to-weeks, compared to months with existing technology. The technologies and architectures employed include RESTful web services (Python/Pyramid), asynchronous messaging (AMQP, RabbitMQ, Python/Celery, Java), MongoDB, auto-scaling and zero-downtime deployment on cloud (AWS), modern front-end libraries (Angular, d3, Grunt).

Aaron also led a team of psychometricians in the development of statistical models of student performance, including both assessment and events (clickstream) data. The models include CTT, IRT, SEM, DCM. Methodologies include MCMC, EFA, CFA. Technologies used include R, Mplus, Hadoop, Hive, Impala, MapReduce.

Aaron Harnly's educational career includes a Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) in Computer Science from Columbia University in the City of New York and a BA in Biology from Princeton University.

Some of their coworkers include Adam Zalisk - SVP, Corporate Strategy, Pam Kirby - SVP, Partner Success, and Catherine Mackay - President & Chief Operating Officer. A direct report to Aaron Harnly is and Nathan Potter - SVP, Engineering. Aaron Harnly reports to Larry Berger, Chief Executive Officer.