Meet Vijaye Raji: Statsig founder and OpenAI CTO now joining Amplitude’s board of directors

Vijaye Raji, founder of product experimentation platform Statsig, has joined the Board of Directors of Amplitude, a digital analytics company.

Raji, the CTO of Applications at OpenAI, expressed his enthusiasm for the new role in a LinkedIn post, saying, “I’m excited to share that I’m joining Amplitude’s Board of Directors!”

According to a press release, “Amplitude and Statsig are coming together to help teams understand customer behaviour, experiment with confidence, and build better products.”

The press release also noted that Statsig will continue to operate as a platform and brand within Amplitude, carrying forward its core mission to democratize data for teams and organisations of all sizes.

Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates praised Raji in the press release, saying that he built the world's best experimentation platform, and emphasised that they are building the future of Amplitude and Statsig together to help teams ship better products.

‘Data helps us make better decisions’

In his LinkedIn post, Raji reflected on his time at Facebook, noting his surprise at the sheer autonomy engineers had — “An idea could become code and reach users within days.”

“Coming from a different way of building software, that was a little scary at first,” he said, emphasising that the underlying infrastructure at Facebook was what made this velocity work—enabling teams to test their ideas, understand their impact, and pivot when something wasn’t working.

“Those tools shaped the culture,” he said. “They gave people the confidence to make decisions and the evidence to learn from them.”

This firsthand experience, Raji said, inspired him to start Statsig in 2021.

With a firm belief that such capabilities shouldn't be limited to big tech but should be made available to every team, Raji ensured developers, data scientists, and product managers everywhere had access to the tools his team had taken for granted.

Today, with AI making software development even faster, Raji said, “That mission feels even more relevant today. AI is making it easier for more people to build software.”

“Building faster only matters if we’re creating more value for customers. We still need to understand what people need, test our ideas, and measure whether what we build makes a difference,” he added. “And we still need product judgment. Data helps us make better decisions; we have to bring curiosity, conviction, and a willingness to change our minds when the evidence challenges us.”

Thanking Amplitude CEO and the board for the opportunity, Raji said, “Joining the board is an opportunity for me to help carry that mission forward as Amplitude and Statsig build their next chapter together.”

Who is Vijaye Raji?

Vijaye Raji is a highly accomplished engineer, product leader, and entrepreneur.

According to his LinkedIn profile and public background information, Raji’s tech journey began in Puducherry. He attended Petit Seminaire and later graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Pondicherry University.

His professional career began in the early 2000s at Wipro, followed by a stint at Nokia in Finland.

He then joined Microsoft in Seattle, where he spent nearly a decade. Raji began his career at Microsoft working on developer tools and software platforms. During his extensive tenure there, he was instrumental in building foundational products such as early versions of the Visual Studio editor, the Windows Application Framework, and the SQL Server Modeling Language and Runtime.

In 2011, Raji left Microsoft and joined Facebook (now Meta) as a software engineer. Over the next decade, he climbed the corporate ladder rapidly. He initially worked on the Audience Network and Messenger.

By 2014, he was leading the engineering teams for Facebook Marketplace and Groups Commerce. In 2017, his responsibilities expanded to include leading Facebook Gaming and overseeing live streaming, cloud gaming, and gaming communities. He ultimately rose to VP and Head of Entertainment, as well as Head of Facebook Seattle, where he helped scale the regional office to over 5,000 employees.

Raji left Meta in 2021 to pursue his startup ambitions, founding Statsig to make sophisticated measurement tools accessible to everyone. Under his leadership as CEO, Statsig built an advanced statistical engine with features like sequential testing and variance reduction, helping teams at major companies like Figma, Notion, and Brex make rigorous, data-informed decisions.

In 2025, OpenAI acquired Statsig for a reported $1.1 billion. Following the acquisition, Raji joined OpenAI as the CTO of Applications, where he currently leads Ads, Growth, and foundational data and engineering components.