Natalia Vassilieva

Meet Natalia Vassilieva, VP and Field CTO at Cerebras Systems

Meet Natalia Vassilieva, VP and Field CTO at Cerebras Systems, an AI chip unicorn that landed on Time Magazine’s 2024 100 Most Influential Companies in the world.

Born in Russia, Vassilieva holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science from St. Petersburg State University. 🇷🇺

Vassilieva has a rich background in AI and ML, with decades of research and development experience. Her academic contributions include being an Associate Professor at St. Petersburg State University and a lecturer at the Computer Science Center in St. Petersburg.

Before joining Cerebras Systems, Vassilieva held significant roles at Hewlett Packard Labs, leading the Software and AI group and serving as head of HP Labs Russia. She researched the computational needs of data analysis tasks, including deep learning algorithms, gaining valuable insights into the ideal hardware architecture for efficient and powerful AI systems.

In 2019, Natalia Vassilieva joined Cerebras Systems, a Silicon Valley AI hardware company and potential NVIDIA rival rumored to IPO soon. Rising from Senior Technical Product Manager to VP and Field CTO, Vassilieva has played a key role in developing the company's technology.

Cerebras' Wafer Scale Engines (WSEs) are the world's largest computer chips designed for complex AI deep learning (see the picture of Vassilieva holding the wafer chip).

Vassilieva has been nominated for several prestigious awards, including the AI Research category at VentureBeat's 5th Annual Women in AI Awards last year.

Loved her recent interview in which she said women should be more proactive in their careers: "We need to believe we can do a lot of things, and maybe trust ourselves more and be more confident in what we do.”

Totally agree!