From Hyderabad to Silicon Valley: Who is Uday Ruddarraju, the Indian-origin techie leading OpenAI’s compute push?

OpenAI has promoted Uday Ruddarraju to the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute, placing him in a key leadership role to drive the company’s compute ambitions. The Hyderabad-based techie joined OpenAI in 2025 after working as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Elon Musk’s xAI.

Ruddaraju shared a LinkedIn post confirming the transition, saying that “I’m stepping into the CTO, Compute role at OpenAI.” Highlighting his time at the company, he said, “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.”

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As Ruddaraju takes on the new role, he highlights that he has bigger plans for the company’s compute infrastructure and aims to strengthen OpenAI’s ability to scale AI models. “We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming up,” he said.

“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.”

Who is Uday Ruddarraju?

As per Raddarraju’s LinkedIn profile, he has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT) in Hyderabad. While in college, he had the opportunity to work as an intern at Amazon Web Services.

Later, Ruddarraju also pursued a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, in the US. Coming to his corporate journey, he has held several technology leadership roles across major companies before joining OpenAI.

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He has worked with eBay between 2013 to 1017, with his latest role being senior member of technical staff and technical lead for cloud and platforms. He later joined Robinhoot and worked for nearly 6 years, securing lead roles over the years. 

In 2024, he joined xAI as Head of Infrastructure Engineering, and after a year, he joined OpenAI as Head of Compute and Infrastructure. Now, his role has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Compute.