From Research Lab to Record-Breaking Product: How OpenAI Engineered for Unprecedented Scale

Sulman leads ChatGPT Engineering at OpenAI, driving the development and scaling of one of the world’s most impactful AI products. He pushes the boundaries of innovation by turning cutting‑edge research into practical, accessible tools that transform how people interact with technology. Previously at Meta, Sulman founded and scaled Instagram Reels, IGTV, and Instagram Labs, and helped lead the early development of Instagram Stories.

He also brought MetaAI to Instagram and Messenger, integrating generative AI into experiences used by billions. Earlier in his career, Sulman was on the founding team that built and launched UberEATS from the ground up, helping turn it into a global food delivery platform. With a track record of marrying technical vision, product strategy, and large‑scale execution, Sulman focuses on building products that meaningfully change how people live, work, and connect.

Samir is the Technical Lead for ChatGPT at OpenAI, where he is currently leads the Personalization and Memory efforts to scale adaptive, useful, and human-centered product experiences to over 700 million users. He works broadly across the OpenAI stack—including mobile, web, services, systems, inference, and product research infrastructure.

Previously, Samir spent nine years at Snap, working across Ads, AR, Content, and Growth. He led some of the company’s most critical technical initiatives, including founding and scaling the machine learning platform that powered nearly all Ads, Content, and AR workloads, handling tens of billions of requests and trillions of inferences daily.

Lawrence Bruhmuller is currently the SVP of Engineering at Great Expectations, the open source data quality solution used by thousands of data engineers in the industry. He has over 12 years of experience as an overall head of engineering, mostly focused on growth stage startups. Previous roles include CTO roles at Pave and Optimizely, and VPE roles at WeWork, ClearSlide, and Symantec.

Lawrence has been a part of small startups and also larger companies, and has developed products for individual users and also the world’s largest enterprises. In particular, he has focused on delivering cloud-first products in the B2B application and developer tooling spaces.

Lawrence is passionate about the intersection of engineering management and the growth stage of startups. He has written extensively on engineering leadership (https://lbruhmuller.medium.com/), including how to best evolve and mature engineering organizations before, during and after these growth phases. He enjoys advising and mentoring other engineering leaders in his spare time.

Lawrence holds a Bachelors in Mathematics and Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, and a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Claremont Graduate University. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife Amy and their three daughters.