How a Hyderabad engineer without an IIT tag became OpenAI’s compute chief
HYDERABAD: Indian-origin technology leader Uday Ruddaraju has been promoted as Chief Technology Officer of Compute at OpenAI, nearly a year after joining the company from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence firm xAI.
Ruddaraju joined OpenAI after serving as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at xAI. His promotion comes as OpenAI expands the computing infrastructure required to train and deploy advanced artificial intelligence models.
“My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding,” Ruddaraju said while announcing his new role.
He said the Compute team had worked relentlessly to bring computing capacity online quickly and reliably while building systems across compute, networking, storage and machine learning to train frontier models such as GPT-5.6.
Building world’s largest AI computing footprint
Ruddaraju said OpenAI’s next phase would involve solving increasingly complex engineering challenges as the company scaled its infrastructure.
“Our goal is to build the world’s largest computing footprint so advanced AI reaches more people and becomes part of every workflow,” he said.
He added that OpenAI’s expansion plans span large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing and data centre construction across civil, mechanical and electrical engineering.
Career beyond the IIT route
Ruddaraju’s career has drawn attention because he completed his undergraduate studies at a Hyderabad engineering college instead of an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) or National Institute of Technology (NIT).
He earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT), Hyderabad, where he also secured an internship with Amazon Web Services.
He later moved to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Ruddaraju worked at eBay between 2013 and 2018 before joining Robinhood. He later moved to xAI, where he played a key role in developing the company’s artificial intelligence infrastructure.
His move to OpenAI attracted industry attention, with reports describing him as one of the most prominent executives recruited from xAI.
In his farewell message to xAI, Ruddaraju thanked Elon Musk and the xAI team for the opportunity to help build Colossus, the company’s large-scale AI computing system.
He described the project as a rare opportunity to contribute to foundational AI infrastructure and said working directly with Musk had been one of the most valuable experiences of his career. He also praised the execution capabilities of Musk and the xAI team.
