Joaquin Quiñonero Candela

CEO

Mountain View, California, United States24 yrs experience

AI ML PractitionerAI Enabled

Key Highlights

Led AI safety initiatives at OpenAI.
Doubled hiring throughput while maintaining quality.
Expert in responsible AI and large-scale systems.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a leader in AI and machine learning with a focus on responsible deployment and large-scale systems.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

System ArchitectureAlgorithm DesignLeadershipResponsible Ai

Other Skills

Large Scale DevelopmentClarityTechnical LeadershipCommunicationAcoustic GuitarMatlabHigh Performance ComputingBig DataCPythonProgrammingStatisticsC++Computer VisionScalability

About

I work on large-scale AI systems and the responsibility that comes with deploying them. At OpenAI, I led the creation of the Preparedness Framework v2 and chaired the Safety Advisory Group, helping shape how frontier capabilities are evaluated before release. I later led Recruiting during a period of exponential growth, doubling hiring throughput while maintaining a high technical and cultural bar. I’m now back in a hands-on technical role, reconnecting with craft and taking time to think carefully about what meaningful work should look like in this next phase. I care about intellectual honesty, depth over scale, and doing what’s right even when it’s inconvenient.

Experience

24 yrs

Total Experience

3 yrs 2 mos

Average Tenure

2 yrs

Current Experience

Openai

4 roles

Member of Technical Staff

Feb 2026 – Present · 3 mos

Returned to a hands-on technical role to reconnect with craft and follow curiosity in frontier AI systems.

Head of Recruiting

Jun 2025 – Feb 2026 · 8 mos

Took on an unconventional lateral move from a technical leadership role to lead Recruiting during a period of exponential growth. Rebuilt capacity and culture, expanded the team significantly, and doubled hiring throughput in roughly six months while maintaining a high technical and cultural bar. Reset the bar and sharpened focus, investing deeply in morale and a strong “one team” spirit, leaving the organization better staffed and aligned for continued growth.

Intern on the Health Team

Apr 2025 – Jun 2025 · 2 mos

Took a deliberate step back into a learning role to immerse in frontier model development and hands-on technical work. Focused on reconnecting with implementation details, model evaluation workflows, and close research collaboration. Had the honor to contribute as a co-author to HealthBench, an open benchmark evaluating LLM performance and safety in realistic healthcare conversations.

Head of Preparedness

Mar 2024 – Apr 2025 · 1 yr 1 mo

Drove the creation of OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework v2, shaping how frontier AI capabilities are evaluated, governed, and deployed responsibly. Chaired OpenAI’s Safety Advisory Group, which reviewed deployments prior to release. My team produced and oversaw every model System Card and the associated Preparedness Framework scorecards.

Technical Fellow for AI

Feb 2022 – Mar 2024 · 2 yrs 1 mo · California, United States

System ArchitectureLarge Scale DevelopmentClarityLeadershipAlgorithm DesignTechnical Leadership

Harvard's belfer center

Senior Fellow

Dec 2021 – Jun 2023 · 1 yr 6 mos

Senior Fellow for Technology and Public Purpose Project (TAPP)

ClarityResponsible AILeadershipAlgorithm Design

Government of spain

Member at Spain's Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council

Jul 2020 – Mar 2024 · 3 yrs 8 mos

ClarityLeadership

Facebook

4 roles

Distinguished Tech Lead for Responsible AI

Nov 2019 – Sep 2021 · 1 yr 10 mos

I support Facebook's cross-company efforts to understand and mitigate the risks and unintended consequences of the widespread use of AI across our family of products. These include concerns and requirements around unintended bias and inclusion, robustness, transparency and accountability, privacy and security. This is no zero-sum game: increasing the trustworthiness of AI in product almost always results in a better product overall, both for people and for the business.

System ArchitectureLarge Scale DevelopmentClarityLeadershipAlgorithm DesignTechnical Leadership

Director, Society and AI Lab

Apr 2018 – Nov 2019 · 1 yr 7 mos

I built and helped grow a new team, Society and AI Lab, focussed on ensuring the responsible use of AI in Facebook products. We built best practices, tools and processes to understand and mitigate fairness and algorithmic bias concerns, to improve robustness and reliability in ML systems and to explore human-centric and more inclusive AI-powered products.

System ArchitectureLarge Scale DevelopmentClarityLeadershipAlgorithm DesignTechnical Leadership

Director of Engineering for Applied Machine Learning

Promoted

Feb 2014 – Apr 2018 · 4 yrs 2 mos

I lead the Applied Machine Learning organization at Facebook, focussed on applied research. Our team is incredibly lucky to power every team at Facebook that uses machine learning, speech recognition, machine translation, natural language understanding and computer vision.
We have built the machine learning platform used across Facebook to perform rapid experiments, evaluate new modeling paradigms, and ship and maintain models in production. We have built massive scale new algorithms that have made disruptive impact. We have also built a computer vision platform capable of processing every image and video on Facebook. The team owns services and products around translation, natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition.

System ArchitectureLarge Scale DevelopmentClarityLeadershipAlgorithm DesignTechnical Leadership

Engineering Manager, Ads Core Optimization

May 2012 – Feb 2014 · 1 yr 9 mos

I support a team that builds the machine learning infrastructure necessary to perform rapid experimentation, and very regularly launch models to production to improve the performance of Facebook's Ads delivery. The team owns the end to end process, from research to owning the production models.

Algorithm Design

Partnership on ai

Member Board of Directors

Aug 2018 – Feb 2022 · 3 yrs 6 mos

ClarityLeadershipCommunication

University of cambridge

Guest Lecturer

Jan 2012 – Aug 2012 · 7 mos · Greater Cambridge Area

Completely revamped the Machine Learning course at the Engineering Department, together with Carl Rasmussen.
The material is freely available online:
http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/teaching/4f13/1112/

System ArchitectureAlgorithm DesignTechnical Leadership

Microsoft

2 roles

Principal Applied Researcher

Sep 2011 – May 2012 · 8 mos

Led click prediction team for sponsored advertising on Bing, as well as the auction optimization team.

Algorithm Design

Senior Applied Researcher

Jan 2007 – Aug 2011 · 4 yrs 7 mos

System ArchitectureAlgorithm DesignTechnical Leadership

Fraunhofer first.ida

Senior Research Scientist

Feb 2006 – Sep 2006 · 7 mos

I am a project leader for research projects at
the Fraunhofer Institut für Rechnerarkitektur
und Softwaretechnik, currently working on brain-computer
interfaces

Algorithm DesignTechnical Leadership

Universidad carlos iii de madrid

Visiting Researcher

Jan 2006 – Jan 2006 · 0 mo

Algorithm Design

Max planck institutes tübingen

Postdoctoral Researcher

May 2004 – Jan 2006 · 1 yr 8 mos · Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

I worked on probabilistic machine learning, in particular on understanding the Bayesian implications of approximate inference for computational efficiency. My publications can be found here: www.quinonero.net.

Algorithm DesignTechnical Leadership