Anyscale is the company behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework used to train and serve some of the world's largest AI systems. Founded by the creators of Ray at UC Berkeley's RISELab, Anyscale provides a managed compute platform that lets enterprises scale Python and AI workloads across any cloud, with the performance of bare metal and the ergonomics of a notebook.
Linda Haviv is a Staff Developer Advocate at Anyscale and founder of CodingCrystals.com, best known for her wildly nonlinear path from philosophy major and professional singer to site reliability engineer and AI infrastructure advocate. After graduating summa cum laude as Baruch College's salutatorian, teaching herself to code at The Flatiron School, and spending years as a JavaScript developer and SRE at Fox Corporation, she joined AWS as a developer advocate before landing at Anyscale — the company behind Ray, the open-source distributed computing framework that powers OpenAI's ChatGPT training. She uses her platform to demystify AI infrastructure for developers everywhere, and sells STEM-inspired crystal jewelry on the side.
Robert Nishihara is a co-founder of Anyscale, the company commercializing Ray - the open-source distributed computing framework powering AI workloads at OpenAI, Apple, Uber, and thousands of other organizations. A Harvard math grad and UC Berkeley PhD, he built Ray during his doctoral research to solve the tooling bottlenecks he personally experienced doing AI research. Anyscale has raised $259.6M and reached a $1B+ valuation under his leadership before he transitioned from CEO to a product-focused role in mid-2024.
Jason Ding is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Salesforce, leading the engineering teams behind Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Revenue Cloud — the backbone of the world's largest CRM platform. A PhD computer scientist turned performance engineering pioneer, he set nine SPEC benchmark world records at Cisco, helped drive UCS to $1 billion in revenue in under three years, and is now steering Salesforce's engineering toward a future of AI agents and billion-transaction-per-day scale. With 14+ years at Salesforce and deep roots in academia and chip-level performance work at Intel, Ding brings a rare combination of theoretical rigor and enterprise execution.