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Rajat Monga

Rajat Monga is a software engineer and entrepreneur, a founding member of Google BrainGoogle BrainGoogle Brain was Google’s AI research team, co-founded by Jeff Dean and others in 2011. It open-sourced the TensorFlow machine learning system in 2015 and was merged with DeepMind into Google DeepMind in April 2023.Open the full entry and co-founder and longtime lead of the TensorFlow machine learning framework, who later founded Inference.io and became MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry’s corporate vice president of AI Frameworks.

Contents15 sections
Key facts

IIT Delhi and Early Engineering Work

He also led engineering at Quova; Attributor was later acquired by Digimarc and Quova by Neustar.⁠[3]

From Search Ads to Google Brain

At Google Brain he co-created and led DistBelief, Google’s distributed deep learning system.⁠[1]

Co-Authors a Large-Scale Unsupervised Learning Paper

Co-Authors the DistBelief Paper

He was third author of the NIPS 2012 paper “Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks,” which presented DistBelief, a software framework able to use clusters of thousands of machines, to train a deep network 100 times larger than those in earlier literature.⁠[6]

Co-Founds and Leads TensorFlow

From 2014 to 2019 he co-founded and led TensorFlow, Google’s machine learning framework.⁠[4]

TensorFlow Is Open-Sourced

He was one of the authors of the TensorFlow whitepaper; the system’s API and reference implementation were released as open source under the Apache 2.0 license in November 2015.⁠[7]

Interviewed as Head of TensorFlow Engineering

In June 2016 he was interviewed on the O’Reilly Data Show as a Google director of engineering managing the TensorFlow engineering team, recalling that when the team started in 2011 “everybody was using stochastic gradient descent.”⁠[8]

Co-Authors the TensorFlow Systems Paper

In November 2016 he and other Google Brain members, including Martín Abadi, presented a paper at OSDI ’16 describing how TensorFlow uses dataflow graphs to represent computation, shared state and the operations that mutate it, at large scale and in heterogeneous environments.⁠[9]

Presents TensorFlow 1.0 at the First TensorFlow Dev Summit

In February 2017 the TensorFlow team announced TensorFlow 1.0 at the first TensorFlow Developer Summit in Mountain View, when TensorFlow was used in more than 6,000 open-source repositories.⁠[10]

As TensorFlow’s engineering director, he presented traditional machine learning tools such as K-means and support vector machines at the summit, along with prebuilt “canned estimators.”⁠[11]

Appears on the Lex Fridman Podcast

Runs Inference.io

He and Varun co-founded Inference.io, a smart business intelligence platform for analysts and business users that combines dashboards with machine learning and automation.⁠[3]

He became CEO of Inference.io.⁠[4]

Interviewed as a Microsoft Corporate Vice President

In December 2024 he was interviewed on The Effortless Podcast as Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI Frameworks, leading AI software engineering and inferencing infrastructure, and discussed TensorFlow’s impact, the rise of PyTorch and the challenges of building startups.⁠[13]

Appears on the Engineering Leadership Podcast

In April 2026 he appeared on episode 256 of the Engineering Leadership Podcast as Microsoft’s corporate vice president of AI Frameworks, responsible for an efficient AI stack from cloud to edge, and reviewed his path from Google Brain and TensorFlow to Inference.io and Microsoft.⁠[14]

Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts

Sources

  1. Ep 28 - AI Insights with Rajat Monga: From TensorFlow to Path of Innovation (opens in a new window)
  2. Rajat Monga | MLconf - The Machine Learning Conference (opens in a new window)
  3. Quild Mini🦄 #148: Inference.io (opens in a new window)
  4. Co-Founder & CEO, Inference.io (opens in a new window)
  5. Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning (opens in a new window)
  6. Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks (opens in a new window)
  7. TensorFlow: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems (opens in a new window)
  8. Building intelligent applications with deep learning and TensorFlow (opens in a new window)
  9. TensorFlow: A System for Large-Scale Machine Learning (opens in a new window)
  10. Announcing TensorFlow 1.0 (opens in a new window)
  11. Google releases TensorFlow 1.0 with new machine learning tools (opens in a new window)
  12. Rajat Monga: TensorFlow (opens in a new window)
  13. A Conversation with Rajat Monga: From TensorFlow to Next-Gen AI (opens in a new window)
  14. Scaling TensorFlow, Navigating Startup Pivots, ML Edge Infrastructure and AI Inference Strategy (opens in a new window)
  15. Rajat Monga (opens in a new window)