---
title: "Akele Reed"
category: "people"
role: "Principal AI Engineer"
company: "Sondermind"
linkedin: "https://www.linkedin.com/in/akele-reed"
sourceLabels: ["Official speaker roster", "Official conference schedule"]
---
# Akele Reed

## Profile
Principal AI Engineer at [[sondermind|Sondermind]].

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/akele-reed)

## Biography
Principal AI Engineer at SonderMind, Akele Reed leads the team behind the company's conversational AI mental health feature and has served as a primary architect of its guardrails and evaluations framework. Her work sits at the intersection of AI capability and responsibility, designing systems that earn trust through rigorous safety pipelines, human expert feedback loops, and continuous oversight in one of the highest-stakes domains in healthcare. Akele is passionate about making AI trustworthy not just in theory, but in production and building the infrastructure and culture that allow engineers and clinicians alike to confidently rely on AI-powered tools. She brings over nine years of experience in applied AI and model training, including her previous role at 23andMe, and holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. Away from the screens, she enjoys hiking, beekeeping, and baking.

## Conference Sessions
- [[2026-06-30-akele-reed-evals-driven-development-engineering-a-mental-health-ai-coach-ethically-and-safely]] — Evals Driven-Development: Engineering a Mental Health AI Coach Ethically & Safely (2026-06-30, 2:50pm-3:10pm)

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph summarizes how this person appears across the conference source graph: scheduled sessions, linked videos, transcripts, and slide-derived evidence.

### Linked Sessions
- [[2026-06-30-akele-reed-evals-driven-development-engineering-a-mental-health-ai-coach-ethically-and-safely|Evals Driven-Development: Engineering a Mental Health AI Coach Ethically & Safely]]

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.