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.
Latest RSS News
- Andrei Harwell selected as Krane Art History Scholar-in-ResidenceAndrei Harwell, executive director of the Yale Urban Design Workshop and senior critic at the Yale School of Architecture, has been selected as the scholar-in-residence for the third annual Krane Art History Guest Residency program at Connecticut College.
- Florianny Norman Reyes ’26 selected for national human rights fellowshipFlorianny Norman Reyes ’26 has been selected as a 2025-2026 Fellow for Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights’ John Lewis Young Leaders program (JLYL), a year-long undergraduate fellowship that prepares college students for a future in community organizing and civic engagement.
- August in PicturesWelcome Weekend kicks off a new academic year.
- Justin Finkel ’25 named D3CA Region I Student-Athlete of the YearSwimmer Justin Finkel ’25, the winningest athlete in Connecticut College history, has been named the Men’s Sport Student-Athlete of the Year for Region I by the Division III Commissioners Association (D3CA).
- ‘A lucky bunch:’ 111th Convocation welcomes new students to the Conn communityIn her keynote address at Connecticut College’s 111th Convocation on Aug. 26, Hans and Ella McCollum ’21 Vahlteich Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemistry Department Chair Tanya L. Schneider declared the College's newest students “a reasonably lucky bunch” and encouraged them to embrace every opportunity Conn provides.
- Conn welcomes Class of 2029As they arrived on the refreshingly cool morning of Aug. 20, Connecticut College’s 483 new students—including 462 first-years and 21 transfers—were greeted by cheering student leaders, colorful signs and a campus community eager to welcome the newest herd of Camels in Conn’s 114-year history.
