Rick Izzo has spent well over a decade building open source AI tooling and scientific computing infra. He began as a medical imaging researcher & open source maintainer, then co-founded Tensor[werk], later acquired by Lightning AI. Notable past projects include VMTK, RedisAI, Hangar, and PyTorch Lightning. Since joining NVIDIA, Rick has maintained and championed the Autonomous Job Recovery Engine, designing scheduler-neutral recovery interfaces applicable across both Slurm and Kubernetes.