Runware expands engineering leadership with senior hires from NVIDIA, OpenAI and NetApp

New Head of Infrastructure Engineering, CISO and Principal Engineer bring decades of experience scaling GPU infrastructure at major AI and cloud companies

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, November 5, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Runware, the AI cloud platform redefining the compute layer for AI with factory-built modular data centers, today announced three senior engineering hires to its leadership team. Risto Haukioja joins from NVIDIA as Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Matti Oikarinen joins from OpenAI as Chief Information Security Officer, and Matt Baldwin joins from NVIDIA as Principal Engineer, AI Infrastructure.

The appointments follow a period of rapid expansion for Runware, which closed a $50 million Series A in December 2025, launched Runware Serverless, a serverless GPU platform, in October, and last week unveiled a modular AI data center factory that will build Sonic Pods, its modular containerized data centers, on an assembly line at up to 30 megawatts of capacity a day. NVIDIA’s DSX POD reference design, announced at GTC Berlin, validates the approach Runware has been building towards from the start. The result is a new kind of AI infrastructure: serverless and dedicated GPU compute on hardware Runware designs, builds and operates itself, at around half the cost of a conventional neocloud and an order of magnitude below traditional hyperscalers. All three hires are based in the United States and extend Runware’s engineering presence in the San Francisco Bay Area, close to its customers, partners and the NVIDIA ecosystem.

Risto Haukioja, Head of Infrastructure Engineering, joins from NVIDIA, where his most recent project was NVIDIA NIM, the company’s inference microservices platform. He spent eight years at NVIDIA as a senior engineering leader focused on AI inference, building and leading the performance engineering teams that take models from research into production at scale. His career spans more than 20 years, including large-scale enterprise systems work at Hewlett Packard in Europe and the United States and an early role in cloud computing, where he co-authored Cloud Computing Architected: Solution Design Handbook (2011). He has co-founded three software companies and holds a master’s degree from Aalto University in Helsinki. At Runware, he leads engineering for the systems that run and manage the company’s GPU infrastructure, turning a rapidly expanding hardware footprint into a reliable, high-performance inference platform.

Matti Oikarinen, Chief Information Security Officer, joins from OpenAI, where he worked on frontier AI security. He brings more than two decades of experience building and securing large-scale technology platforms, with senior roles including Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, VP Architect and Distinguished Engineer at Yahoo, Principal Software Engineer at Amazon, including work on Yahoo’s user database serving more than 3 billion users and Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), and Chief Architect at Nokia. He holds an extensive portfolio of patents. At Runware, he leads information security, strengthening the platform’s security foundations, meeting enterprise customer requirements and building the trust required of infrastructure at scale.

Matt Baldwin, Principal Engineer, AI Infrastructure, joins from NVIDIA, where he was Director of Engineering for large-scale Kubernetes across DGX Cloud, leading the teams behind the control plane that runs NVIDIA’s GPU data centers. Before NVIDIA, he founded StackPointCloud in 2014, a Seattle-based platform for deploying and managing Kubernetes across the major public clouds, and bootstrapped it to more than 10,000 users before its acquisition by NetApp in 2018. He then served as NetApp’s Director of Cloud Native Engineering and Chief Kubernetes Architect, where he created and led the NetApp Kubernetes Service. At Runware, he applies that experience to deploying, orchestrating and scaling the infrastructure behind the platform.

“Our mission is to power the world’s intelligence, and that means building the full stack, from the pods on the factory floor to the API a developer calls. Running that at scale is a different class of problem from renting cloud capacity, and we wanted people who have already solved it,” said Flaviu Radulescu, Founder and CEO of Runware. “Risto, Matti and Matt have built and secured this kind of infrastructure at NVIDIA, OpenAI and NetApp. They join us at the point where our hardware footprint is growing fastest.”

“NVIDIA’s announcement of modular, container-based data centers at GTC validates the architecture Runware has been building for two years,” said Risto Haukioja, Head of Infrastructure Engineering at Runware. “Very few teams have taken this design from prototype to production. Runware is one of them, and the opportunity to scale it is why I joined.”
Additional senior hires

Runware has also added senior engineers to its infrastructure team, including a Senior Staff Engineer, Infrastructure Systems with more than three decades of experience across networking and systems software at companies including Juniper Networks. The new hires join a leadership team that already includes a Head of Partnerships from Amazon Web Services and founders who previously built bare-metal infrastructure for Vodafone, Booking.com and Transport for London.

Further detail on each appointment is available on the Runware blog. Read more about the Runware factory announcement and Sonic Pods.

About Runware

Runware is the AI cloud platform redefining the compute layer for AI. It gives developers one API for image, video, audio and language models, serverless GPU compute and dedicated clusters, all running on infrastructure the company designs, builds and operates itself. Its Sonic Pods are modular containerized data centers built in Runware’s own factory and deployed in days rather than years, delivering GPU compute at around half the cost of a conventional neocloud and an order of magnitude below traditional hyperscalers. Founded in 2023 by Flaviu Radulescu and Ioana Hreninciuc with the mission of powering the world’s intelligence, Runware is headquartered in London with a growing presence in San Francisco. Investors include Dawn Capital, Insight Partners, Speedinvest, Comcast Ventures and a16z Speedrun. Learn more at runware.ai, explore the model library or read the documentation.

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