# Vicki Cheung

> Vicki Cheung is a Hong Kong-raised software engineer, startup founder, and infrastructure leader whose career has repeatedly begun before the playbook existed. An early engineer at Duolingo, OpenAI's first engineer and head of infrastructure, a compute engineering leader at Lyft, and later Gantry's co-founder and CTO, she built products and platforms by watching what users actually did. Public professional records in 2026 place her at Harmonic as a vice president.

- **Role:** Vice President at Harmonic
- **Organizations:** Harmonic, Gantry, Lyft, OpenAI, TrueVault, Duolingo, Carnegie Mellon University
- **Education:** Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
- **Known for:** Built early versions of Duolingo's Android app and web frontend and led development of the Duolingo Incubator., Designed and scaled OpenAI's early cloud and colocation infrastructure as its first engineer., Co-authored OpenAI's 2016 account of its deep-learning infrastructure and the release of a batch-oriented Kubernetes autoscaler.

## Career timeline

- **2009** — Served as a teaching assistant for Carnegie Mellon's 15-451 Algorithms course.
- **2010-2014** — Joined the project that became Duolingo, ultimately as an early founding engineer; worked on speech recognition, web and Android clients, APIs, localization, experimentation, and led the Incubator.
- **2014-2015** — Worked at TrueVault as a staff software engineer and engineering lead on the core API and infrastructure.
- **2015-2017** — Became OpenAI's first engineer and head of infrastructure, designing and scaling cloud and colocation systems for research workloads.
- **2018-2020** — Led Lyft's compute team as an engineering manager, then worked as a senior staff software engineer; helped move batch, machine-learning, and production workloads toward Kubernetes.
- **2018-2020** — Served as a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon conference co-chair and keynote speaker.
- **2020-2024** — Co-founded Gantry with Josh Tobin and served as CTO, building tools to monitor, evaluate, and improve machine-learning applications in production.
- **2022** — Gantry emerged from stealth after raising $28.3 million across seed and Series A financing.
- **2026-present** — Public professional profiles list Cheung as a vice president at Harmonic.

## Achievements

- Built early versions of Duolingo's Android app and web frontend and led development of the Duolingo Incubator.
- Designed and scaled OpenAI's early cloud and colocation infrastructure as its first engineer.
- Co-authored OpenAI's 2016 account of its deep-learning infrastructure and the release of a batch-oriented Kubernetes autoscaler.
- Led Lyft's compute team during its adoption of Kubernetes for batch, machine-learning, and production workloads.
- Co-chaired KubeCon + CloudNativeCon events and delivered infrastructure keynotes.
- Co-founded Gantry, which raised $28.3 million to build infrastructure for improving production machine-learning systems.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — LinkedIn lists Harmonic as her current organization, while Dealroom lists her as a vice president there beginning in 2026.
- **2024-09** — Public employment records place the end of her co-founder and CTO tenure at Gantry in September 2024.
- **2024-04** — Featured in Amplify Partners' Technical Recruiting Playbooks discussing the ownership, proactivity, and business awareness needed in founding engineers.

## Links

- Website: https://vickicheung.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickicheung
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/vmcheung
- GitHub: https://github.com/vicki-c

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/vicki-cheung
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-26