Mozilla Welcomes Raffi Krikorian as Chief Technology Officer (blog.mozilla.org)

Mozilla has appointed Raffi Krikorian as its first-ever portfolio-wide Chief Technology Officer to lead efforts in building trustworthy, open-source AI at a time when AI development and power are concentrated in a few large companies. The hire signals Mozilla’s intent to push practical, values-driven alternatives—emphasizing transparency, user agency, and broad participation—rather than only critiquing closed systems. Krikorian’s remit spans Mozilla’s product and research portfolio, including Firefox, Thunderbird, Mozilla.ai (with early open projects like the any-suite), and Mozilla Ventures’ startup investments, positioning the organization to accelerate open tooling, developer choice, and interoperable systems in AI/ML. Krikorian brings deep operational and technical pedigree: past roles include CTO at Emerson Collective, first CTO of the U.S. Democratic National Committee (data, security, and election tech), Director of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center (led rollout of the first passenger-carrying self-driving fleet), and VP of Platform Engineering at Twitter (global infrastructure). For the AI/ML community this means Mozilla under Krikorian is likely to prioritize scalable infrastructure, production-hardened open models, reproducible pipelines, data governance, and applied safety practices—concrete building blocks for auditable, community-aligned AI alternatives that can be deployed at real-world scale.