Amit Puntambekar Is one of TIME's 2026 Executives of the Year: Tech and Data - Time Magazine

As CTO of Reddit, Amit Puntambekar oversees the technology behind one of the internet’s largest repositories of human conversation. “Our mission is to make sure people connect with communities with the most authentic human voices,” he says.

Puntambekar took the job because the mission is personal: he sees solving loneliness as "a real human need," and Reddit as one of the few platforms that can address it. Since joining the company in February—first as EVP of consumer engineering, then promoted to CTO in April—Puntambekar has focused on utilizing AI to provide better personalization, discovery, and search experiences, as well as improved moderation tools. By helping match the site’s 514 million weekly users with niche communities, the company’s use of AI allows them “to feel a sense of happiness and belonging,” he says. (Reddit’s long-running human conversations, comments, and up-and-down votes also provide valuable data for training models.)

Previously, Puntambekar held engineering leadership roles at Atlassian and Meta, and co-founded the video-compression company QuickFire Networks, which the latter (then Facebook) acquired in 2015. He has long turned to Reddit for everything from advice on dating, fundraising, gardening, and now parenting. “Kids don’t come with manuals,” he says. “My manuals were Reddit.”