Who Is Uday Ruddaraju? The Indian-Origin Techie Now Leading OpenAI's Compute Team

Indian-origin technology executive Uday Ruddaraju has been appointed Chief Technology Officer, Compute at Microsoft-backed OpenAI, marking another milestone in a career that has taken him from Hyderabad to some of the world’s biggest technology companies.

Ruddaraju, who joined OpenAI in July last year after leaving Elon Musk’s xAI, announced his new role in a LinkedIn post, describing his first year at the company as “incredibly rewarding.”

From Hyderabad To Silicon Valley

Ruddaraju completed his Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Hyderabad’s Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT). While still in college, he interned at Amazon Web Services before moving to the United States to pursue a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.

Career Across Big Tech

His professional journey began at eBay, where he worked between 2013 and 2018. He later joined stock trading platform Robinhood before moving to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI.

In 2025, Ruddaraju was among several prominent xAI engineers who joined rival OpenAI amid intense competition for AI talent.

What Will He Do At OpenAI?

As CTO, Compute, Ruddaraju will oversee the infrastructure that powers OpenAI’s frontier AI models.

Announcing his appointment, he said OpenAI’s compute team has worked to rapidly expand computing capacity while building the systems needed to train advanced models such as GPT-5.6.

He added that the company is working to build one of the world’s largest AI compute footprints, with plans spanning large-scale distributed systems, networking, storage, hardware, manufacturing and data centre infrastructure.

“We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming up,” Ruddaraju wrote, adding that OpenAI is hiring engineers across multiple disciplines as it scales its AI infrastructure.