Nvidia is staffing up as it draws heightened scrutiny. These are the key leaders it gained and lost last year.

• Nvidia has added key marketing, policy, and HR executives over the past year.
• Several senior software acqui-hires came via startup deals.
• Executive turnover appeared to slow in 2025 compared to high-level departures in 2024.

Nvidia has added high-profile names to its senior leadership and technical ranks over the past year, as the chipmaker reaches new levels of visibility and wealth.

Nvidia's latest major hire is its first chief marketing officer, Alison Wagonfeld, a veteran of Google Cloud. Over the past year, the company has also acqui-hired senior software leaders through startup deals, tapping its balance sheet to supercharge growth. It has also sought talent from outside the tech industry, including hires from government and academia.

Taken together, they underscore Nvidia's position as an AI chip designer expanding its software products, with added cybersecurity and marketing muscle to engage governments and large enterprise customers, alongside software and research executives to build the programs that run on its hallmark GPUs.

While 2024 saw the departure of key leaders, such as Keith Strier, Nvidia's former vice president of worldwide AI initiatives, and enterprise computing executive Manuvir Das, turnover at the top was more limited in 2025.

Nvidia did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Here's a list of key hires Nvidia has made since January 2025:

Kristin Major, SVP of human resources

Kristin Major joined Nvidia as senior vice president of human resources last February, after spending over 13 years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, where she held roles across the company's legal and HR departments. At Nvidia, Major serves on CEO Jensen Huang's executive leadership team, according to the executive search firm ON Partners.

Jiantao Jiao, director of research

Jiantao Jiao announced he was joining Nvidia in June. He works on AI post-training, evaluation, agents, and building better infrastructure, with the aim of fostering collaboration between academia and industry. Previously, he was the CEO and cofounder of Nexusflow AI, and he is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mark Weatherford, head of cybersecurity policy and strategic engagement

Mark Weatherford serves as Nvidia's head of cybersecurity policy and strategic engagement. Prior to joining Nvidia, he held several roles across the public and private sectors, including serving as the nation's first deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration.

Rochan Sankar, founder and CEO of Enfabrica

Rochan Sankar, the founder and CEO of AI startup Enfabrica, is joining Nvidia through a $900 million acqui-hire in September that also saw the chip giant license his startup's technology. Other employees at Enfabrica — which builds systems to cluster GPUs together for large AI workloads — also joined Nvidia as part of the deal.

Krysta Svore, vice president of applied research — quantum computing

Krysta Svore joined Nvidia in November after nearly 20 years at Microsoft, where she served as VP of advanced quantum development. At Nvidia, she'll "lead applied research and engineering across the quantum stack," according to a LinkedIn post.

Danny Auble, senior director of system software

Late last year, Nvidia acquired Danny Auble's startup SchedMD, which creates the open-source workload management software Slurm. Nvidia said it will keep Slurm open-source and continue to invest in the software. Auble serves as Nvidia's senior director of system software.

Jonathan Ross, chief software architect, and Sunny Madra, vice president of hardware

Nvidia hired Groq founder Jonathan Ross and COO Sunny Madra in December, following a $20 billion deal to license its inferencing technology. The deal signaled a significant shift in the AI market from training to inference. Groq said in a press release that while some team members would join Nvidia, the company will continue to operate independently.

Alison Wagonfeld, chief marketing officer

Alison Wagonfeld, who served as Google Cloud's head of marketing for roughly a decade, joined Nvidia in January as its first-ever CMO. In "moving from one AI leader to another," Wagonfeld wrote on LinkedIn that she would join Huang's leadership team and head up marketing and communications at the company through "its next phase of growth."

Notable departures from Nvidia since 2025

Dieter Fox, former senior director of robotics research

Dieter Fox, Nvidia's former senior director of robotics research, left the company in June after roughly eight years to join Ai2, a nonprofit AI research institute. At the institute, Fox works on foundation models for robotics.

Minwoo Park, former vice president

Minwoo Park, a vice president at Nvidia who worked on autonomous vehicle research, left the company this month to join Hyundai. At the automaker, Park will serve as head of the advanced vehicle platform division and CEO of its self-driving arm, 42dot, working on software-defined vehicles and autonomous driving software.

Ellen Ochoa and Rob Burgess, board members

Nvidia lost two board members in 2025. Ellen Ochoa, a veteran astronaut who served on the nominating and corporate governance committee, left for personal reasons in July, while Rob Burgess, a longtime tech executive, died in December.

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