If you’ve never heard of Uday Ruddarraju, don’t worry—you’re not alone. He’s not the guy giving TED Talks. He doesn’t flood LinkedIn with motivational threads. But in the background of the biggest AI races on earth, he’s the one writing the rules of scale.Last week, Uday exited Elon Musk’s xAI—where he was Head of Infrastructure Engineering—and quietly joined Sam Altman’s OpenAI, the force behind ChatGPT. This wasn’t just a job switch. It was a heavyweight move in the escalating arms race of AI infrastructure.But the real story? It’s Uday’s career itself—one of sharp pivots, hard skills, and quiet influence in rooms that run the world’s most powerful machines.
From Minneapolis classrooms to ‘Mission Critical Code’
Uday is an alumnus of the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, a public research university known for engineering depth over flash. He didn’t graduate from an Ivy League or headline-grabbing tech institute. He went through the Midwestern grind and came out with core systems knowledge, the kind that’s easy to overlook—but impossible to replace.
Amazon: Lessons in scale
One of Uday’s earliest stints was at Amazon, where he worked on the infrastructure backbone that supports the world’s largest cloud ecosystem—Amazon Web Services (AWS).Here, he focussed on building and scaling service infrastructure across distributed systems. His team ensured that services met demanding latency benchmarks while remaining resilient to traffic surges.Key deliverables included:
- Developing scalable data ingestion pipelines for real-time analytics.
- Creating load-balancing modules that reduced latency across multiple data centres.
- Implementing auto-scaling frameworks that could react in milliseconds to surges in user requests.
eBay: Modernising legacy giants
After Amazon, Uday moved to eBay, where the challenge was different: Legacy systems.Uday was part of eBay’s core site reliability and infrastructure engineering team, working on systems that handled billions of dollars in annual trade—but were often tied down by legacy code. While Amazon taught him how to build big, eBay taught him how to fix big.
Robinhood: The fintech fast lane
At Robinhood, Uday stepped into a world where milliseconds matter. Every glitch has real-world monetary impact. As Engineering Manager for Platform and Infrastructure, he helped Robinhood scale its backend to serve a rapidly expanding user base, especially during pandemic-era trading surges. Robinhood gave Uday something new—speed—not just in code execution, but in strategic decisions under fire.
xAI and Colossus: The quiet giant
In 2023, Uday joined xAI, Elon Musk’s stealthy new AI venture with a not-so-stealthy ambition: To outdo OpenAI. At xAI, Uday led the team that built Colossus, one of the most powerful AI training supercomputers ever constructed. It was built to power Grok 3, xAI’s answer to ChatGPT. In simple terms, Uday made sure the most powerful compute cluster in Musk’s arsenal didn’t just work—it flew.When he left xAI, Uday posted on X, “Jensen Huang was right—Elon and his teams are singular in what they can achieve.”
The OpenAI switch
Now, Uday has switched camps. From the underdog building a rival chatbot, he’s joined the titan. OpenAI isn’t just building models—it’s running products at global scale: ChatGPT, DALL·E, Codex, Whisper, and an API suite with enterprise-grade demand.While his exact role at OpenAI hasn’t been disclosed, one thing is clear—he’ll be scaling the engines behind the magic, not chasing the spotlight.TOI Education is on WhatsApp now. Follow us here.
