Uday Ruddaraju has been appointed Chief Technology Officer, Compute at OpenAI.
He previously worked at eBay, Robinhood and Elon Musk's xAI.
Ruddaraju studied Computer Science at Hyderabad's CBIT before moving to the US.
Years before his name appeared in OpenAI's leadership roster, Uday Ruddaraju was a computer science student in Hyderabad, interning at Amazon Web Services while still in college. That early curiosity about how large systems work has now led him to one of the most closely watched jobs in artificial intelligence. OpenAI on Monday said it has appointed Ruddaraju as Chief Technology Officer of Compute.
Ruddaraju announced the appointment in a LinkedIn post, describing his first year at the Microsoft-backed AI company as "incredibly rewarding." "My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding. 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 wrote.
4 July 2026
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He added, "We're 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 center builds spanning civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering."
From Hyderabad To Silicon Valley
According to his LinkedIn profile, Ruddaraju studied Computer Science at Hyderabad's Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) for his undergraduate degree. After his internship at Amazon Web Services, he moved to the United States to pursue a Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.
His professional career began at eBay, where he worked between 2013 and 2018. He then joined the stock trading platform Robinhood before moving to Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, where he served as Head of Infrastructure Engineering.
In 2025, Ruddaraju left xAI to join OpenAI, becoming one of several senior infrastructure leaders to make the switch amid intense competition for AI talent between the two companies.
Exit From xAI
Ruddaraju's departure from xAI drew attention because of his seniority at the company and his role in building its infrastructure. In a farewell message shared at the time, he thanked Elon Musk and the xAI team for the opportunity to work on the company's supercomputer project.
"Thank you Elon Musk and everyone at xAI for the rare opportunity to help build something truly foundational with Colossus. It was a privilege to be part of a mission this bold, and to see from the inside what relentless focus and execution really look like," he wrote.
He also spoke positively about working directly under Musk. "Reporting into Elon and learning directly from him was definitely the best part about working at xAI," he added. Referring to Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang, he wrote, "Jensen Huang was right, Elon and his teams are singular in what they can achieve. Grateful to have played a small part in shaping the future of AI Compute from the inside."
As Chief Technology Officer, Compute, Ruddaraju will oversee the infrastructure that powers OpenAI's frontier AI models, including the large scale distributed systems, hardware and data centre operations he outlined in his announcement. He noted that OpenAI is hiring engineers across multiple disciplines as it scales its infrastructure to meet the demands of training and running its models.
Part Of A Larger Trend
Ruddaraju's appointment adds to a long list of Indian-origin executives holding top positions at global technology companies. The most recent high-profile addition to this group was CRED founder Kunal Shah, who was named global head and chief executive officer of WhatsApp last month. The Meta-owned platform serves more than three billion users worldwide.
Other Indian-origin leaders in the technology sector include Vikram 'Vik' Bajaj, who previously worked at Google X and now leads the industrial AI startup Prometheus alongside Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Prometheus has raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation since launching in November last year.
Shailesh Jejurikar, who was born in Mumbai, became CEO of Procter & Gamble in January this year, after nearly four decades at the company. In October 2025, Anthropic appointed Rahul Patil, who grew up in Bengaluru, as its Chief Technology Officer, overseeing the company's engineering functions including compute, infrastructure and security.
The broader roster of Indian-origin leaders at global technology firms includes Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google; Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube; Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista Networks; Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEOof IBM; Shantanu Narayen, Chairman and CEO of Adobe; Nikesh Arora, Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks; and George Kurian, CEO of NetApp.
Ruddaraju's rise from an engineering college in Hyderabad to a senior leadership role at OpenAI reflects this continuing pattern of Indian-origin professionals reaching the top ranks of the global technology industry.
