- Rahul Patil appointed CTO of AI startup Anthropic, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish
- Patil began his career at Microsoft and held senior roles at AWS, Oracle, and Stripe
- He helped Stripe process $1 trillion in payments with 99.999 per cent reliability
Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic has appointed former Stripe chief technology officer (CTO) Rahul Patil as its new CTO. Patil succeeds co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will transition to the role of chief architect. Patil's appointment has gained significant attention online, especially among students from smaller colleges in India, as he did not study at an IIT, unlike many Indian-origin executives reaching the top executive positions in the US.
"I am excited to join a new mission and calling, Anthropic! AI possibilities seem endless, and it is going to be an extraordinary adventure of discoveries and effort to make these possibilities real," said Patil in a LinkedIn post.
"More importantly, it is going to require us to make a conscientious set of decisions every day to safely navigate this massive transformation and ensure that responsible AI wins."
Who Is Rahul Patil?
Currently a resident of Seattle, Washington, Patil started his academic journey in Bengaluru at PES Institute of Technology (PESIT) as a Computer Science undergraduate (1998-2002). He later pursued a Master's in Computer Science from Arizona State University (2003-2004), followed by an MBA from the University of Washington (2011-2013).
Patil started his career with Microsoft, where he spent nine years in various engineering roles. In 2013, he joined Amazon Web Services as a manager, helping build the massively scaled data processing platforms to enable mobile-app developers, IoT developers, and cloud dev-ops engineers to make sense of their streaming big data in near-real-time.
He later went on to serve as senior VP for cloud infrastructure at Oracle, where he was responsible for engineering and product management products across compute, storage, security, and monitoring services.
Prior to his promotion as Stripe CTO, Patil helped advance the company's engineering capabilities as the deputy CTO. It was under his tenure that Stripe processed $1 trillion in total payment volume, all while maintaining a reliability rate of 99.999 per cent.
Patil's Strengths
Having over 20 years of experience working at tech giants, Patil is known in the industry for building enterprise-scale infrastructure. As CTO, Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and a variety of other engineering tasks.
In the chief architect role, McCandlish will work on pre-training and large-scale model training, extending much of his previous work. Both Patil and McCandlish will report to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
