The Engineering Hub

The Engineering Hub works directly with organizations to turn big ideas into scalable, sustainable solutions, providing on-demand technical partnership that accelerates development and helps teams navigate complex technical hurdles.

Challenge & Opportunity

Mission-driven organizations tend to operate with limited staff capacity, and their breakthrough work often pushes them into technical territory with few existing blueprints to guide them. This can make it difficult to take full advantage of advanced technology such as AI and convert concepts into tools that actually work. And with scarce talent that pairs AI skills with education-sector insight, keeping solutions grounded in what truly drives teaching and learning isn’t easy.

Through the Engineering Hub, Renaissance Philanthropy is rewriting the playbook for supporting innovation with a centralized, in-house engineering team built to amplify impact. 

Challenge & Opportunity
Program Support

Program Support

The Engineering Hub offers fast, flexible access to technical guidance for organizations pursuing technology-driven projects, particularly those leveraging AI. For technical talent looking to build their capacity with a highly skilled team, the Hub also offers a unique opportunity to contribute directly to high-impact projects and innovate in close collaboration with other experts.

Serving as a core thought partner and support engine across multiple Renaissance programs, the Hub is available to help organizations refine their technical approaches and address tough challenges as they emerge. This includes expert advice on functionality, tool development, and capacity planning for sustainability beyond the engagement period.

The Hub has been especially impactful in unlocking progress within the AI and Education program. Examples include:

  • Learning Engineering Virtual Institute (LEVI). Incubated within LEVI, the Engineering Hub originated as a central support for teams of learning engineers using AI to address ambitious educational goals. In the LEVI Math initiative, teams are building interventions aimed at doubling the rate of middle school math progress. The Engineering Hub has played a key role by providing hands-on technical expertise to help advance solutions.

  • AI-Powered Support and Coaching for Educators for Next-Generation Development (ASCEND). ASCEND is a new initiative aimed at transforming teacher coaching across Sub-Saharan Africa through AI. With Engineering Hub guidance, two organizations will build and deploy AI-powered coaching tools that deliver real-time, personalized teacher feedback.

  • Education Technical Support. Beyond LEVI and ASCEND, the Hub supports a range of additional education-focused organizations, helping organizations make progress on ambitious projects when they may not have the capacity to pursue them internally. This includes helping organizations without an existing technical base set up or refine their AI roadmaps and build the foundational capabilities needed to continue deepening their impact beyond the program period.

Project Highlights

Project Highlights

Carnegie Learning: As part of the LEVI program, the Engineering Hub played a central role in helping the organization advance their LiveHintAI tool, an LLM that offers live chat-based for students working through math problems. In collaboration with the Hub, the team added plotting capabilities that allow the tool to generate visual representations of math concepts through graphs and diagrams.

Rising Academies: Rori is a student-facing chatbot that provides students in sub-Saharan Africa with personalized assistance and practice during mathematics learning. The Engineering Hub worked hand-in-hand with Rori’s developers to improve conversation design, build in guardrails to keep students safe, and ensure that Rori’s conversations are anchored in high-quality pedagogy and instructional materials. 

Program Team

Program Team

Thomas Christie

Director, The Engineering Hub

Zachary Levonian

Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Ralph Abboud

Program Scientist (Affiliate)

Featured Publications

Featured Publications

With a commitment to strengthening learning engineering at large, the Hub collaborates closely with participating organizations to disseminate cutting-edge insights and advance new areas of research. Explore examples of publications co-authored with LEVI teams below.