Indian-origin tech executive Uday Ruddaraju has been appointed Chief Technology Officer, Compute at Microsoft-backed OpenAI, a year after parting ways with Elon Musk’s xAI.
Ruddaraju, who did his BE in Computer Science from Hyderabad-based Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology, announced his new role on LinkedIn. He joined OpenAI in July last year.
“I’m excited to share that I’m stepping into the CTO, Compute role at OpenAI. My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding,” he said.
Ruddaraju was among the key xAI employees who joined rival OpenAI last year amid increasing competition for talent and resources between major companies in the Artificial Intelligence sector.
“Our Compute team has worked relentlessly to bring capacity online quickly and reliably, while doing the deep systems across compute, network and storage, and ML work needed to train frontier models like GPT-5.6. As we scale, the problems only get harder that require pushing the frontiers and innovating across every layer (literally) of the stack,” he said.
Ruddaraju said OpenAI was on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow.
“We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming up. There is a lot to build across large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data centre builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering. We’re hiring exceptional people across the stack,” he said.
Ruddaraju interned at Amazon Web Services while in college and later moved to the US for a Master’s in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.
From 2013 to 2018, he worked at eBay before moving to Robinhood. He later joined xAI before moving to OpenAI last year.
