Indian-origin engineers gain leadership roles as Musk’s xAI undergoes major overhaul ahead of SpaceX IPO — Who are they?

Three engineers of Indian origin have been elevated to leadership roles as Elon Musk plans to overhaul xAI’s engineering team, according to a new report. The alleged changes come at a time when xAI is merging more closely with SpaceX ahead of the rocket company’s mega IPO (initial public offering).

According to a report by Business Insider, citing an internal memo, SpaceX executive Michael Nicholls said the company was “clearly behind” its peers and was taking action to catch up to them as quickly as possible.

Three engineers of Indian origin to lead key teams

Devendra Chaplot, who joined xAI last month, will lead pre-training, where he will oversee the first phase in which an AI model learns general patterns from massive data sets, including text, images and code, according to Business Insider. The team’s new leader is a former researcher at Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs.

Meanwhile, the model factory and molding department will be managed by Indian-origin engineer Aman Madaan, who will oversee the infrastructure, data pipelines and training workflows used to develop and improve the AI ​​models.

Aditya Gupta will be responsible for post-training and reinforcement learning. This is the final stage where an AI model is fine-tuned, aligned with human preferences, and optimized for real-world use cases such as chat or coding assistance.

Michael Nicholls rose

According to Business Insider, based on a person with knowledge of the matter, SpaceX executive Michael Nicholls, who is the senior vice president of Starlink at the space company, will now also be the president of xAI.

SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year and is on track to hold an initial public offering this year, according to multiple media reports. But over the past few months, xAI has lost many of its co-founders and senior leaders and has also gone through a series of organizational changes as it races to keep up with AI rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

Now xAI founder Elon Musk is applying the “Tesla playbook” to rebuild the company from its roots.

Changes in xAI product and infrastructure team

Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg, who joined xAI in March after stints at AI coding giant Cursor, have also seen their roles rise. The duo will lead the company’s product team, which oversees Grok Main, Grok Voice and Grok Imagine.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Jake Palmer will manage the physical infrastructure, while the computing infrastructure will be overseen by SpaceX software engineering director Daniel Dueri.

Other SpaceX employees have also taken on leadership roles at xAI. This includes Matt Monson, who led the Starlink software at SpaceX and will now lead data at xAI.

According to the memo reviewed by Business Insider, Nicholls said that xAI’s computing performance was “embarrassingly poor” and that the company plans to significantly improve the same over the next two months.

In the alleged memo, Nicholls said the changes in roles would take effect immediately, adding that the company was working to give employees titles that better describe their roles.

In February, Elon Musk reorganized xAI and announced a new internal structure. Tesla and SpaceX engineers also came to the company’s Palo Alto office to help with the changes, Business Insider reported, citing people familiar with the development; Because eight of the 11 xAI co-founders left the company before the IPO.