No IIT, NIT. Hyderabad techie, grew up without a computer at home, was rejected by 27 universities. How did he land a job in Meta?

Growing up, he did not have a computer at his home. He was also rejected by no less than 27 universities in the US. Yet, a techie from Hyderabad, Telangana managed to bag a job at the coveted Meta and today, is a CTO at a San Francisco-based startup. Taking to X, user Vikas Alwys shared the incredible journey of Soumith Chintala. He didn’t have the pedigree of an IIT, NIT to his name. He graduated from VIT University in 2009.

His academic background did not stop him from pursuing bigger ambitions. Hoping to continue his education in the United States, he applied to numerous universities but was turned down by 27 of them. Rather than abandoning his dream, he continued submitting applications until he finally secured admission to New York University.

At NYU, his career gained significant momentum. He worked under renowned deep learning expert Yann LeCun, an experience that helped shape his expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Even after earning his graduate credentials, professional success did not come easily. He encountered repeated job rejections, and visa-related complications eventually forced him to leave the United States temporarily.


Despite these setbacks, Chintala refused to give up. His persistence paid off in 2014 when he joined Meta AI's research division. There, he played a leading role in creating PyTorch, an open-source machine learning framework that has become one of the world's most widely used AI development platforms. Today, PyTorch serves as the foundation for a vast share of global artificial intelligence research and is extensively used by organizations including Meta, Tesla, OpenAI, developers of autonomous driving technology, and countless research institutions.

Over the next eight years, Chintala guided PyTorch's evolution from a promising project into the dominant framework for AI research, achieving adoption across nearly 90 percent of the field. During his 11-year tenure at Meta, he advanced from an L4 software engineer to Vice President and Fellow, becoming one of the company's most influential leaders in AI infrastructure. He later left Meta to become the Chief Technology Officer of the San Francisco-based startup Thinking Machines Lab, marking another milestone in his extraordinary career.