Vicki Cheung

Vicki Cheung is a software engineer who builds the infrastructure behind machine learning, and she has been a founding engineer three times. She was a founding engineer at Duolingo and led engineering at TrueVault before OpenAI was founded in December 2015, when she was among the named founders and its first engineer. At OpenAI she built the infrastructure on top of Kubernetes and gave a KubeCon keynote on it in 2017, then joined Lyft in 2018 to move the company to Kubernetes and co-chaired KubeCon in 2019 and 2020. With Josh Tobin she co-founded the startup Gantry, which came out of stealth in 2022 with $28.3 million, and she served as its CTO. She is Vice President of Engineering at Harmonic.

Now at: Harmonic
Badges: Founder
Bridge
Links: Website, X and LinkedIn

Timeline

By 2015

Founding engineer at Duolingo

Before OpenAI is founded in December 2015, she works as a founding engineer at Duolingo, where the team grows from four to forty while she leads the Incubator, a platform to crowdsource language course creation, and builds the Android app. She then becomes engineering lead at TrueVault, working on the core platform API and infrastructure.
December 2015

First engineer at OpenAI

OpenAI is founded as a nonprofit in December 2015, and she is among its named founders. As its first engineer, she builds the infrastructure from scratch on top of Kubernetes before the researchers start.
2017

KubeCon keynote on AI infrastructure

She leads infrastructure at OpenAI, where deep learning experiments with large numerical compute requirements run at scale. In 2017, she and Jonas Schneider give the keynote "Building the Infrastructure that Powers the Future of AI" at CloudNativeCon + KubeCon Europe.
2018

Kubernetes at Lyft

She joins Lyft in 2018, when the company manages containers with an internally built container scheduler, and one of her primary goals there is to move Lyft to Kubernetes. She manages the Compute team.
2019–2020

Co-chairing KubeCon

In 2019, she co-chairs KubeCon in San Diego while managing Kubernetes infrastructure at Lyft. In 2020, she co-chairs KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe and helps drive Lyft's company-wide Kubernetes migration.
2019–2022

Co-founding Gantry

In 2019, she teaches a deep learning course at UC Berkeley with Josh Tobin, a former OpenAI research scientist. The two go on to co-found Gantry, a service that helps AI teams decide when to retrain their systems and which data to use, and it emerges from stealth in 2022 with $28.3 million in seed and Series A funding. She leads engineering at the company.
August 2023

A talk on hiring founding engineers

In August 2023, she joins Amplify's Technical Recruiting Playbooks as a three-time founding engineer and CTO of Gantry. She talks about finding founding engineers with a strong ownership mentality, proactiveness and an eagerness to learn about user needs and business goals.
As of October 2026

VP of Engineering at Harmonic

She serves as Vice President of Engineering at Harmonic, after her earlier role as co-founder and CTO of Gantry.