Indian-Origin Engineer Vijay Raji Appointed First CTO of Applications at OpenAI

Indian-origin engineer Vijay Raji, originally from Puducherry, has been appointed as the first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Applications division at OpenAI. This newly created role is aimed at strengthening OpenAI’s consumer-facing AI products.

Raji brings over two decades of experience to the company. He began his career at Microsoft, where he worked as a lead engineer on projects like the Windows application framework and the Visual Studio Editor.

This appointment was announced alongside OpenAI’s $1.1 billion acquisition of StatusG, a product experimentation platform founded by Raji in 2021. The deal was an all-stock acquisition.

In his new role, Vijay Raji will report to Fidji Simo, CEO of OpenAI’s Applications division. He will lead product engineering for ChatGPT and Codex, and oversee critical infrastructure and integrity systems that power OpenAI’s products.