Srinivas Narayanan

Narayanan graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1995 with a B.Tech. in computer science and engineering, and later earned an M.S. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.⁠[1]

In 1997 Narayanan joined IBMIBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is an American information technology company, renamed in 1924 from the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R).Open the full entry’s Almaden Research Center as a research engineer, working on distributed systems and object-relational databases; he spent about three years at IBM.⁠[2][1][3]

He then became a founding engineer and director of technology at Tavant Technologies, and co-founded Viralizr, a startup building social collaboration products, where he served as chief technology officer.⁠[1][3]

Narayanan spent more than 13 years at Facebook, later renamed MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry. As director of engineering for Facebook Photos he founded the computer vision team that began the company’s early deep learning work; he also devised the interest graph, introduced the location product and led engineering for the Oculus developer platform.⁠[3][1]

His last role at Meta was vice president of engineering leading the AI Applied Research & Engineering Group, whose work covered computer vision, natural language processing, speech and personalization.⁠[4][3]

On January 3, 2018, Narayanan, then director of engineering in Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning group leading its computer vision, natural language, speech and personalization teams, gave a talk titled “AI at Scale at Facebook” at the IIT Madras Department of Computer Science and Engineering, describing how Facebook applied AI across its main app, Instagram, Messenger and Oculus.⁠[5]

In April 2023 Narayanan joined OpenAI as vice president of engineering. He wrote on LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: “Over the past year, I got to know the amazing people at OpenAI and the incredible work that they are doing.”⁠[3][2]

At OpenAI he led the product and engineering teams of the Applied organization behind ChatGPT, the developer platform and the infrastructure that keeps these products running reliably at scale, and helped launch and scale ChatGPT and the developer API.⁠[6][1]

In 2025 Narayanan was named to Forbes India’s “30 Indian Minds Leading the AI Revolution” list.⁠[1]

In September 2025 Narayanan became OpenAI’s chief technology officer of B2B Applications, overseeing engineering and infrastructure for the developer APIs, platforms and enterprise applications.⁠[2][1]

Narayanan received the IIT Madras Distinguished Alumni Award for 2026.⁠[1]

On April 17, 2026, Narayanan announced on X: “After 3 incredible years, I am leaving OpenAI at the end of next week.” He said he had shared his decision with OpenAI’s leadership team at the start of the month, and recalled leading the Applied Engineering team “from when it was, 40 people on a single floor.”⁠[7]

He said that after leaving he would spend time with his aging parents in India before deciding on his next move.⁠[2][8]

In the same period, Kevin Weil, who headed OpenAI for Science, and Bill PeeblesBill PeeblesBill Peebles is an artificial intelligence researcher, first author of the diffusion transformer (DiT) paper, who led OpenAI’s video-generation model Sora and, after leaving OpenAI in 2026, co-founded an AI video startup for filmmakers.Open the full entry, who led research on the Sora video model, also left the company.⁠[8]

Narayanan is co-founder and president of the Narayanan Family Foundation, which focuses on education and environmental sustainability; he is also a founding member of The/Nudge Institute and a board member of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Pratham USA.⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/snsf (opens in a new window).⁠[7]