Data Engineering · Applied AI · Product Management

Richard Basile

Engineering leader at the intersection of data engineering, applied AI, and technical product strategy, delivering value through team leadership, driving roadmaps, and shipping capabilities that produce measurable business outcomes. A progression from database and pipeline engineering through technical and product leadership of large-scale enterprise platforms and AI-enabled features across a global EdTech company. Deep background in cloud-native data architecture, distributed systems, and real-time pipelines, with recent work encompassing Databricks platform governance, generative AI capability development, and product strategy.

Principal Engineer, Data Engineering & Applied AI
Mar 2022 - Present
McGraw-Hill Education  ·  Columbus, Ohio
Engineering leader and technical authority building AI Data Enablement from the ground up and driving applied AI initiatives across the organization, owning canonical data standards and working closely with data science, platform engineering, and data analytics. Hire and lead distributed engineering teams, set platform roadmap, deliver BI dashboards and reporting for the business, and engineer the underlying Databricks platform solutions, including ETL pipelines and graph data workflows.
  • Architect and engineering lead for the AI Data Enablement program — a shared framework enabling McGraw-Hill's AI Platform applications to produce, share, and consume consistent, trustworthy data with minimal custom work, giving leadership a unified view for investment and portfolio decisions across the enterprise — owning the canonical event schema end to end: designing the schema, data contract framework, and SDK ecosystem; coordinating implementation with application teams; and partnering with Data Analytics leadership to ingest event and Pendo data into the datalake and surface adoption metrics through Tableau.
  • Managed multiple teams of individual contributors, including offshore and nearshore contractors and distributed FTEs, across concurrent projects — owning full-cycle hiring, setting priorities, reviewing deliverables, and maintaining alignment with executive priorities.
  • Managed AI platform roadmap and feature prioritization — translating business objectives into engineering outcomes across multiple product lines and aligning delivery with executive priorities.
  • Spanned the full spectrum of applied AI delivery — hands-on prototyping of LLM integrations, RAG pipelines, and agentic workflows; data engineering support for data science model development; and team/roadmap leadership shipping AI features to production — bringing both technical depth and delivery accountability to AI initiatives across the organization.
  • Built BI dashboards to meet stakeholder requirements, surfacing usage and cost metrics and product-specific KPIs, providing the data foundation for roadmap decisions and executive reporting.
  • Engineered enterprise data platform solutions on Databricks including medallion architecture, ETL pipelines in Scala and Python, compute governance, and graph data integration workflows supporting AI features and educational outcomes analysis.
Stack   AWS · Azure · GCP · Databricks · Bedrock · Foundry · Python · Scala · SQL · JSON Schema · Neo4j
Lead Engineer, Platform Engineering
May 2018 - Mar 2022
McGraw-Hill Education  ·  Columbus, Ohio
Technical leadership for cloud-native platform engineering supporting large-scale digital education infrastructure — managing database engineers, driving architecture decisions, and owning delivery practices across distributed teams.
  • Led a team of database engineers directing architecture decisions and delivery practices across distributed cloud-native platform initiatives.
  • Directed major database migrations to Amazon Aurora, improving scalability, performance, and reliability for high-traffic production systems serving millions of learners.
  • Built CI/CD pipelines using Turbot, Terraform, and CircleCI, standardizing secure and consistent deployments across engineering teams and reducing deployment risk.
  • Strengthened platform observability and proactive performance management using CloudWatch, Sumo Logic, and New Relic — reducing incident response time and improving production reliability.
  • Contributed to real-time data pipeline development and internal tooling in Java, Scala, and Node.js to enhance platform extensibility.
  • Directed RDS migrations and developed training and documentation supporting platform adoption across distributed teams.
Stack   AWS · GCP · Aurora · Databricks · OpenSearch · Terraform
Senior Data Architect
Feb 2017 - May 2018
Halo Communications  ·  Columbus, Ohio
Led modernization of a mission-critical clinical communication platform under HIPAA and HITRUST compliance requirements — defining and executing a strategic roadmap that delivered significant reliability and performance improvements while platform usage tripled.
  • Achieved up to 72% improvement in response times while platform usage increased 252% — through targeted optimization strategy and cross-functional execution with DevOps and application teams.
  • Engineered a high-availability SQL Server architecture using AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Windows Server Failover Clustering across a three-node enterprise cluster.
  • Defined and executed a strategic roadmap balancing platform stabilization with long-term scalability objectives, working directly with executive stakeholders.
Stack   AWS · SQL Server · AlwaysOn Availability Groups · WSFC
Senior Database Architect
Apr 2012 - Feb 2017
McGraw-Hill Education  ·  Columbus, Ohio
Led architecture and scaling of data infrastructure for a global digital education platform serving millions of users, directing a team of database engineers through sustained high-growth.
  • Technical lead for a team of 4 database engineers, directing architecture decisions and scaling strategy for a platform supporting 20K+ concurrent users.
  • Scaled the core Oracle RAC application database from 250GB to 2TB on a four-node cluster, supporting 20K+ concurrent users and 22M+ monthly sessions — directly enabling product growth without platform constraint.
  • Built a real-time clickstream analytics pipeline using AWS API Gateway, Lambda, Kinesis, and Elasticsearch — an early production streaming implementation on AWS-native architecture delivering visibility into EdTech usage metrics and user behavior.
  • Designed scalable data models, caching strategies, and content structures to support a high-volume, user-facing digital platform.
Stack   AWS · Oracle RAC · Kinesis · API Gateway · Elasticsearch · Java · SQL · PL/SQL
Product & Strategy
Roadmap & Priority Management · Stakeholder Alignment · Business Partner Engagement
AI Platform Engineering
Applied AI · Generative AI Integration · RAG Architecture · Agentic Workflows · Bedrock · Foundry
Infrastructure
AWS · Azure · GCP · Terraform · Datadog · New Relic · CloudWatch · Sumo Logic
Data Platforms
Databricks · Medallion Architecture · ETL/ELT · Athena · QuickSight
Databases
Aurora · PostgreSQL · Oracle · SQL Server · DynamoDB · Elasticsearch · OpenSearch · Neo4j
Languages
Python · SQL · Scala · Java · PL/SQL · Node.js
AWS Certified Developer - Associate
2017
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
2016