Doug Keller

Doug Keller is an AI engineer and architect of the agent platform behind Sonder, SonderMind’s mental-health companion. His work applies more than a decade of full-stack engineering experience to a demanding clinical problem: providing useful support between therapy sessions while preserving patient safety and access to human care.

A University of Akron alumnus, Keller has helped develop generative-AI features that prepare patients for their first therapy appointments and contributed to a clinical-outcomes prototype that won a company hackathon. After receiving an early SonderMind Impact Award, he directed its accompanying charitable donation to Code.org, reflecting his own experience with public-school computer-science programs and need-based educational support. He described those milestones in a public account of his work at SonderMind.

Keller was credited as a Senior Staff AI Engineer at SonderMind for the 2026 AI Engineer World’s Fair session on the company’s mental-health coach. His colleagues Akele Reed and Dave Revere presented the broader team’s approach to clinically grounded AI safety, including:

• Modular clinical safety guardrails: Separate input and output checks surround the conversational system, improving resistance to manipulation while introducing deliberate latency and cost tradeoffs.
• Context-sensitive crisis intervention: Responses distinguish immediate danger from sensitive situations where providing resources and continuing the conversation may better serve the person seeking help.
• Clinician-informed evaluation: Licensed specialists define expected outcomes and turn realistic clinical scenarios into structured tests for prompts, models, and safety systems.
• Open-source guardrail evaluation datasets: SonderMind’s public evaluation framework includes 200 clinically reviewed input scenarios and 100 output scenarios, offering other builders a practical starting point for mental-health safety testing.