Duc Tran ’24

Infrastructure Software Engineer at OpenAI

San Francisco, California

Duc Tran ’24 keeps a close eye on viral social media trends. He’s not an influencer—he’s a member of the infrastructure team at OpenAI, the San Francisco-based technology company known for popular AI tools, including ChatGPT, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and the text-to-video model Sora.

“Part of my job is to make sure our system can scale when there’s a lot of traffic, to make sure we still have a functional app. So when a trend that uses OpenAI image generation, like the Studio Ghibli trend in March, goes viral, our traffic just shoots up significantly,” he explains.

But Duc enjoys the challenge. He says it’s exciting to know his work impacts millions of users.

“It’s been really fun, because it’s not in every workplace that you get to sustain that kind of traffic and solve problems on that scale.”

Duc, who came to Conn as an international student from Hanoi, Vietnam, majored in computer science and mathematics. “I had great professors. They are very knowledgeable, and their classes were always very interesting,” he says. “Because the tech industry moves so fast, day-to-day I use the problem-solving skills and the ability to learn new things quickly that I honed during my time at Conn.”

After his second semester on campus was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic, Duc returned home and spent a year working for a small AI startup. “That was a pretty important time for me, because I got to learn what the industry is like,” he says.

After returning to campus, Duc interned at Microsoft in 2022, and then at Two Sigma, a financial services company, in 2023. He says the two experiences helped him refine his career goals as he learned more about what type of work he was most interested in—and, perhaps just as importantly, what he wasn’t looking for.

“Microsoft is such a big company that I felt I really didn’t get to make much of an impact,” he says. “Two Sigma is a very small firm. I worked on the model engineering team, which helped the researchers have the best data to predict where the market is going. I loved it, because the people were so smart and the work was challenging, but something was still missing; I wanted to work on more product-facing things, something that has a lot of users, where I would be able to see the impact.”

That’s exactly what he’s found at OpenAI.

“It’s exciting to work for a company that is really a market leader and with so many users,” he says.