3 Indian-Origin Engineers Get Top Leadership Roles At Elon Musk’s xAI Ahead of SpaceX IPO: Here's Who They Are

Three Indian-origin engineers, Devendra Chaplot, Aman Madaan, and Aditya Gupta, have been appointed to major leadership roles at Elon Musk's xAI as the company prepares to merge with SpaceX ahead of a highly anticipated IPO. The reorganisation aims to strengthen xAI's competitive position in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape.

Devendra Chaplot: Leading pre-training operations

Chaplot will lead pre-training, the foundational stage where AI models learn from massive datasets. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-Bombay), he later earned a PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University, where his research focused on autonomous navigation systems.

Chaplot was an NTSE scholar and ranked 25th in the IIT-JEE examination. Before joining Musk's companies, he worked at Thinking Machines Lab and earlier at Mistral AI, contributing to models including Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral Large. His work combines machine learning, robotics and computer vision to develop systems capable of understanding and interacting with their surroundings.

Aman Madaan: Heading model infrastructure

Madaan is now in charge of building the tools and infrastructure behind the models, essentially the plumbing that keeps training infrastructure running smoothly. He completed his PhD at the Language Technologies Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professor Yiming Yang.

During his PhD, Madaan worked on language models, specifically focusing on feedback-driven improvements. His research portfolio includes influential work on iterative refinement with self-feedback and automated language model mixing, with publications at top-tier AI conferences including NeurIPS and ICML.

Aditya Gupta: Overseeing post-training and reinforcement learning

Gupta will focus on getting AI models ready for real-world use through general post-training and reinforcement learning, the critical fine-tuning phase where raw models are shaped into useful products. He earned a Master of Science in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Technology in Mathematics and Computing from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

Prior to xAI, Gupta worked at Google from July 2019 to May 2023 as a Senior Software Engineer and Software Engineer II, focusing on natural language understanding for Google Bard and Google Assistant. He also served at Essential AI from June 2023 to December 2024 before joining xAI in January 2025.

The appointments come as xAI undergoes significant restructuring following its acquisition by SpaceX, positioning Indian engineering talent at the forefront of Musk's superintelligence ambitions.