Does the institute matter in the world of technology? Graduates from IIT love to say that it does. But if you ask Uday Ruddarraju, the new CTO of Compute at OpenAI, he might say it doesn’t. That is because Ruddarraju, who never went to any IIT, has steadily risen the ranks in some of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley. And now he is a CTO at OpenAI, a job that can be considered one of the most important roles in the world of tech and AI right now.

Ruddarraju is not even from an IIIT or an NIT. Instead, OpenAI's new CTO, Uday Ruddarraju, studied Computer Science at Hyderabad's Chaitanya Bharathi Institute of Technology (CBIT), a college that many outside Telangana, and perhaps even outside India, may be hearing about for the first time.

However, years after graduating from CBIT, Ruddarraju is now one of the engineers responsible for building the massive computing infrastructure behind some of the world's most advanced AI models.

Ruddarraju's promotion comes just over a year after he joined OpenAI as Head of Compute and Infrastructure.

Announcing the promotion on LinkedIn, he said he was "excited" to step into the new role after spending his first year helping OpenAI rapidly expand the compute capacity needed to train frontier AI models such as GPT-5.6.

“I’m excited to share that I’m stepping into the CTO, Compute role at OpenAI,” wrote Ruddarraju. “My first 12 months at OpenAI have been incredibly rewarding. 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.”
And because it is LinkedIn, he ended his post with a pitch for OpenAI. “We’re hiring exceptional people across the stack. Come build with us,” he wrote.

OpenAI CTO Uday Ruddarraju's career graph

While IIT is not there in his resume, Ruddarraju’s career graph is impressive, thanks to his Masters from a US university. Becoming OpenAI's CTO is far from an overnight success story for him.

After completing his Computer Science degree at CBIT, Ruddarraju took up a few internships, including one as a software engineering intern at Amazon. He then moved to the United States to pursue a Master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota.

After graduating, he joined eBay full-time in 2013 as a Software Engineer II, Cloud Infrastructure. Over the next five years and seven months, he steadily climbed the ranks, eventually becoming Senior Member of Technical Staff and Technical Lead, Cloud and Platforms.

During his time at eBay, he helped build the cloud infrastructure powering one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms.

In 2018, he moved to Robinhood, where he spent nearly six years during one of the company's fastest-growing phases. Starting as a Staff Software Engineer, he rose to become Senior Director of Engineering and Head of Infrastructure, leading the company's infrastructure organisation through periods of rapid expansion and explosive user growth.

In 2024, Elon Musk hired him as Head of Infrastructure Engineering at xAI. His job wasn't to build AI chatbots or design new models. Instead, he was responsible for something just as critical: building the gigantic computing systems required to train them.

In many ways, that has become Ruddarraju's speciality. Wherever AI or cloud infrastructure needs to scale rapidly, he has often been the engineer trusted to build it.
Unlike AI researchers who develop new models, Ruddarraju builds the invisible systems underneath them, enormous GPU clusters, high-speed networking, storage infrastructure and distributed computing platforms that allow companies like OpenAI to train frontier AI models.

That expertise brought him to OpenAI in 2025 as Head of Compute and Infrastructure. Just over a year later, he has been promoted to CTO, Compute, where he will oversee one of the company's most important missions of building what he describes as "the world's largest compute footprint" to power the next generation of AI.

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Published By:

Divya Bhati

Published On:

Jul 21, 2026 14:06 IST