The Hottest Job in the Market: Inside Meta’s AI Hardware Lab

The Hottest Job in the Market: Inside Meta’s AI Hardware Lab

From air-cooled gear to liquid-cooled GPU racks pulling hundreds of kilowatts, Meta’s AI infrastructure is transforming what it means to be a thermal mechanical engineer. As Joshua Held shares, the AI renaissance pulled his team into the front lines of designing rack-scale systems, liquid cooling, and dense GPU deployments, turning what once felt like a niche specialty into a creative awakening. In this @Scale episode with Joshua Held and Yashar Bayani, hosted by Francois Richard, they dive into GPU racks, liquid cooling, power constraints, and how Meta is pushing copper and optics to their limits to build next-generation rack-scale AI systems.

How AI Is Reshaping Product Management | Danran Chen, Senior Product Manager of AI at Zoom

In Episode 5 of the @Scale Podcast, Danran Chen, Senior Product Manager of AI at Zoom, shares how artificial intelligence is transforming product development and collaboration. Danran discusses her path from engineering at Airbnb to leading AI products at Zoom, how AI tools are reshaping the role of product managers, and why building systems around large language models is key to delivering real user value. She also explains Zoom’s federated AI strategy and how AI can free people from repetitive work, allowing more time for creativity and meaningful human connection. Danran is joined by our host, Francois Richard, Engineering Director at Meta.  Learn more about the @Scale Conference here: https://bit.ly/4sIjGcB [https://bit.ly/4sIjGcB]

@Scale Podcast with CEO and Co-Founder of AudioShake, Jessica Powell | Episode 4

In this podcast episode, Jessica Powell, co-founder and CEO of Audio Shake, discusses her company's innovative AI audio separation technology and journey from Google to startup founder. Jessica Powell is the CEO and co-founder of AudioShake, a sound-splitting AI technology that makes audio more usable for both humans and machines. Francois Richard is Engineering Director responsible for the Reliability Infra at Meta. Reliability Infra is focused on improving Meta’s reliability across the entire lifecycle of incidents by ensuring that Meta can swiftly and confidently recover from any type of outage caused by both known and unknown failures. Francois started at Facebook in 2017. His career spans nearly two decades of working in speech recognition, search, e-mail systems and distributed systems at Nuance, Yahoo and Meta. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal.

@Scale Podcast with Founder of Juniper Networks, Dr. Pradeep Sindhu | Episode 3

🎙️ New Episode: @Scale Podcast, Ep. 3 This week, Dr. Pradeep Sindhu — industry visionary, founder of Juniper Networks, inventor of the DPU, and current Microsoft leader — joins host Francois Richard of Meta for an insightful conversation. You’ll hear about: ✨ Lessons from Xerox PARC, Sun Microsystems, and Juniper ✨ The invention of the DPU and why CPUs can’t handle modern workloads ✨ How today’s AI moment compares to the rise of the internet ✨ Advice for startups, scaling teams, and innovating in hardware Perfect for senior engineers, startup builders, and anyone curious about the future of computing and AI infrastructure. Dr. Pradeep Sindhu is an industry visionary currently focused on data processing innovations at Microsoft. Sindhu, who co-founded Fungible Inc. and served as its CEO and CTO, is credited with inventing the Data Processing Unit (DPU) that revolutionized storage system efficiency. He is also the founder of Juniper Networks, where he led the development of all major products that shaped the future of networking infrastructure. Dr. Sindhu’s contributions have redefined networking hardware and software, driving advances impacting cloud computing and AI infrastructure. Francois Richard is Engineering Director responsible for the Reliability Infra at Meta. Reliability Infra is focused on improving Meta’s reliability across the entire lifecycle of incidents by ensuring that Meta can swiftly and confidently recover from any type of outage caused by both known and unknown failures. Francois started at Facebook in 2017. His career spans nearly two decades of working in speech recognition, search, e-mail systems and distributed systems at Nuance, Yahoo and Meta. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal.

@Scale Podcast with Co-Founder of Anyscale and Databricks, Ion Stoica | Episode 2

Joe Spisak, Product Director for Artificial Intelligence at Meta, sits down with Ion Stoica to discuss a wide range of topics related to the AI and machine learning industry, including the resurgence of reinforcement learning, large language models, the power of open source software, and the evolution of the AI tech stack. Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Director of SkyLab (https://sky.cs.berkeley.edu/). He is currently doing research on cloud computing and AI systems. Past work includes Ray, Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, Tachyon, Chord DHT, and Dynamic Packet State (DPS). He is an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy, an ACM Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the Mark Weiser Award (2019), SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2015), and several "Test of Time" awards. He also co-founded three companies, Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013) and Conviva (2006).Joe Spisak is Product Director and Head of Open Source in Meta’s Generative AI organization. A veteran of the AI space with over 10 years experience, Joe led product teams at Meta/Facebook, Google and Amazon where he focused on open source AI, open science and building developer tools such as PyTorch to help the community scale up AI in an open and collaborative way. As the leader of product for PyTorch, he and the team built an amazing platform and community that made PyTorch the leading open source AI development framework in the industry and took it to the Linux Foundation where it now resides in partnership with Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Google, Amazon and more. Joe is also an angel and advisor to companies like Anthropic, Answer.ai, Lastmile.ai, Evolutionary Scale, Udacity, Lightning.AI, and others.