Meet Srinivas Narayanan: IIT Madras alumnus who helped scale ChatGPT

Srinivas Narayanan, a senior engineering leader at OpenAI, announced he will leave the company at the end of next week. This marks a key leadership exit as the company rapidly expands its enterprise AI business.

In a post on X on Saturday, Narayanan said the decision came after “three incredible years,” adding that recent and upcoming product launches made this the right moment to step back.



He currently serves as CTO of B2B Applications and previously led engineering teams responsible for some of OpenAI’s most widely used products, including ChatGPT and its developer API platform.

There is no announcement yet on who will replace him.

Who is Srinivas Narayanan?

Narayanan is a longtime Silicon Valley engineering leader with experience building large-scale consumer and AI systems.

He started his career at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. Before OpenAI, he spent more than a decade at Meta (formerly Facebook). According to his LinkedIn, he led engineering for Facebook Photos, one of the platform’s core products and worked on AI systems including language, vision, and recommendation tools.

The Indian-origin senior executive is an alumnus of IIT Madras (Batch of 1995) and pursued Master’s programme in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Sharing his further plans Narayanan said: “I am looking forward to spending some much-needed time with my aging parents in India before deciding what’s next.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s head of science initiatives, Kevin Weil, and the leader for its Sora AI video team, Bill Peebles, are also leaving the company, adding to a recent string of departures.

Narayanan’s stint with OpenAI

Narayanan helped build and scale OpenAI’s applied engineering team, the group that turns AI research into usable products.

During that time ChatGPT became one of the fastest-growing consumer and enterprise software products while OpenAI’s API platform expanded into a major business line used by startups and large companies.

In his note, Narayanan said the Applied Engineering team started with about 40 people and grew into a much larger organisation supporting global products.

He also credited OpenAI leadership, including CEO Sam Altman and CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, for what he called “the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Also Read: India emerges as OpenAI’s second-largest market: CTO Srinivas Narayanan