Chaya Nayak, who spent nearly nine years at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has quit the company to join Sam Altman’s OpenAI. She will work with Irina Kofman, who is heading special initiatives at the company, and will “explore new opportunities at the frontier of AI”. At Meta, Nayak most recently served as Director of Product Management for Generative AI. She is the third Indian techie to leave Meta after Rishabh Agarwal and Avi Verma, who were hired for Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) on million-dollar salaries.
Quit Meta for OpenAI
In a long LinkedIn post, she announced that she was “turning the page” in her career. She also thanked Meta for the “chance” to build products, lead the FORT team, and contribute to GenAI, including developing three generations of Llama and Meta AI.
“I remember my first weeks at Facebook like they were yesterday. I joined to help jumpstart Data for Good, an effort to show how data and AI/ML could benefit the world. What started as a bold experiment grew into the foundation of my career,” she reflected on her early days at the company on LinkedIn.
Meta shaped me as a person
What began as three weeks at Meta turned into almost a decade of what she described as “the most pivotal experiences of her life”.
Nayak then listed the opportunities she received at Meta, including building teams and products and working through historic moments like the 2020 US elections. “Help the company and the world through historic moments like the US 2020 elections and publish several papers with top researchers in journals like Science on Meta’s impact on elections and democracy,” she added.
When she moved to Meta’s AI division, she said that she tackled complex challenges at rapid speed while envisioning how the next wave of AI could impact society.
On a personal level, Nayak said that Meta shaped her as a leader. It not only taught her confidence but also boldness to pursue ambitious ideas and resilience when things go south.
“It feels like the perfect next chapter: to take everything I’ve learned, and pour it into work that will help define what comes next for technology and society,” she expressed as she joins OpenAI.
Who is Chaya Nayak?
Chaya Nayak is an Indian techie who is currently employed by OpenAI. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Global Studies, specialising in Security, Peace Studies, and Spanish. She pursued further studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a master’s in Public Policy and Data Science.
Chaya Nayak Career
Nayak started her career in 2010 as a project manager at Pathways to Empowerment in Pune, where she worked for five months. She then moved to the United States, joining the City of Milwaukee’s Office of Environmental Sustainability as a Geographic Information Specialist. After a year, she joined The Ergo Group and later joined the Institute for the Future as a consultant.
In August 2012, she joined UC Berkeley as a Head Graduate Student Instructor for Intermediate Microeconomics. She later joined Samasource, where she focused on impact and program management.
“Directed India/Africa vendor teams delivering ML-training datasets for clients. Also led impact studies that quantified income / livelihood-uplift for Samasource workers as part of social responsibility goals/ethos,” she described her work at Sama.
She joined Quid in 2014, where she worked in product and consulting for almost a year. “At Quid, I led Fortune-100 tech accounts (Intel, Venture Capital Firms); Leveraged the Quid NLP search product to produce market insights for use in company strategy, acquisition and due diligence. Led product hero use cases and feature design based on customer needs,” she said.
She later worked with Premise Data Corporation as a Solutions Engineer & Data Scientist and was also selected as a First Mover Fellow at The Aspen Institute.
Then came 2016. She was hired by Facebook (now Meta) as head of Head of Data for Good, and was promoted to Product Manager and later Head of Open Research and Transparency. By 2023, she had been promoted to Director of Product Management for Generative AI.