Why Chen Goldberg walked away from Google to help build CoreWeave’s AI cloud
In 2024, Chen Goldberg left a prestigious role at Google as GM and VP of engineering for the Kubernetes and serverless portfolio after more than eight years at the company. It took a bold new challenge to compel her to make such a change, and she found it at neocloud CoreWeave, where she now serves as EVP of product & engineering.
Goldberg was previously part of the team that helped scale the entire Kubernetes effort at Google, but by 2024 she could see that AI was changing the engineering equation. While Google was still trying to find its AI footing, she saw CoreWeave as a kind of greenfield where she could really make her mark in the emerging world of AI infrastructure, and she made the leap.
"I joined CoreWeave in August of 2024 with the realization that we were at the edge of yet a new era where infrastructure matters even more than before," Goldberg told FastForward.
You do not have to look hard to see a growing thirst for infrastructure to feed the AI beast. It may have seemed foolhardy to some to leave one of the world's largest hyperscalers for a scrappier, smaller company, but Goldberg bet that figuring out how to deliver AI infrastructure at scale was a problem she wanted to help solve. CoreWeave's 2025 IPO, the largest venture-backed U.S. tech IPO since 2021, marked a milestone for the emerging neocloud category and became a bellwether for other AI cloud upstarts.
History repeating
Goldberg didn't just want a new challenge though, she wanted to recapture the sense of building something new from the early days of Kubernetes when the whole stack was up for grabs. She saw that at a company like CoreWeave. "One of the things that I really liked when I was exploring this space is the privilege that we have here at CoreWeave to start almost on a blank page," she said.
Looking back at the start of Docker, Kubernetes, containers and cloud native, she came to see AI as a similarly pivotal technology shaping how the next generation of cloud‑native infrastructure gets built. "We quickly realized that we needed a new stack in order to really unleash the potential of the cloud because lift and shift did not work," she said. "You couldn't just take your application and do nothing and just put it in a Docker image, and that's it, you needed more than that."
And she recognized that AI would require a whole new set of tooling as the focus shifted to AI workloads running on GPUs. "When we started seeing more workloads on GPUs and how the type of workloads have changed, for me it was a realization that this is all happening all over again and probably at a bigger scale," she said, adding that she wanted to be part of a team that could move fast and rethink the assumptions and building blocks from the previous era.
Using AI to build AI infrastructure
As she is leading her team to build AI infrastructure, they're using AI operationally in their engineering process, and she encourages her team to experiment widely. "For our engineering team, we are making most tools available. And right now we're in the experimentation learning phase," Goldberg said. But that doesn't mean people can just run amok because IT fundamentals still apply.
She points out that they learn by observing how people are using various tools, but there are still approval processes in place. "We care about security, we care about compliance, and so this is not about compromising on any of those factors, but we are optimizing for velocity and experimentation, like I think everyone is doing in the industry right now," she said.
AI coding delivers a major boost for both experts and novices. It enables non-engineers like designers and product managers to contribute to the codebase, giving them a skill they previously lacked, while also amplifying the capabilities of experienced developers.
"It's clear that expertise and depth still matters. If you're an engineer that understands the space that you're coding, then the tools are really a superpower for you, and great engineers become 10x greater engineers than before."
Goldberg is clearly energized by her decision to join CoreWeave. "You see me smile, right? I'm an engineer at heart. I thought, this is an amazing time to be in this space and innovating and finding those hard problems," she said.
