Indian-Origin OpenAI CTO Srinivas Narayanan Quits, Plans To Spend Time With "Ageing Parents In India"

Srinivas Narayanan, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of B2B Applications at OpenAI, announced Saturday that he will leave the company at the end of next week after three years. In posts on X and LinkedIn, he said the timing felt right after a run of product launches, and that he plans to head to India to be with family before deciding his next move.

Narayanan wrote that he informed OpenAI leadership earlier this month and described the past three years as "an incredible journey that felt more like ten". "I am looking forward to spending some much-needed time with my ageing parents in India before deciding what's next," he added.

In his post, he thanked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president and co-founder Greg Brockman. "I will cherish this time forever during this historic period for technology and society, and I wish you all the very best for the future," he stated.

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After 3 incredible years, I am leaving OpenAI at the end of next week.

I shared my decision with the OpenAI leadership team at the start of the month and here is a shorter version of what I shared with my team earlier this week.

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Hi Team,
I have decided to leave OpenAI. The…

— Srinivas Narayanan (@snsf) April 17, 2026

The exit closes a three-year stint that began when he joined OpenAI as Vice President of Engineering. He was promoted to CTO of B2B Applications and led engineering teams behind ChatGPT, the API platform and OpenAI's enterprise tools.

"I am looking forward to spending some much-needed time with my aging parents in India before deciding what's next," he wrote at the end. "Thanks again. It has been a privilege to be on this journey with you."

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Who is Srinivas Narayanan?

Narayanan is a longtime Silicon Valley engineering leader. An IIT Madras alumnus, he earned a master's in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and started his career at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

Before OpenAI, he spent more than a decade at Meta, where he led engineering for Facebook Photos and worked on AI systems for language, vision, and recommendations. At OpenAI, he built and scaled the applied engineering team - the group that turns research into products used by millions.