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Builders & open source

Alban Desmaison

Research Engineer, Meta

  • Research Engineer, Meta15
  • Lead Core Maintainer, PyTorch (open-source project)21

Alban Desmaison is a Research Engineer at Meta and the Lead Core Maintainer of PyTorch. PyTorch's maintainers page also lists Desmaison as a module maintainer for torch.nn, torch.optim, autograd, multiprocessing, and Build + CI. Desmaison co-authored the 2019 PyTorch paper and the PyTorch 2 paper (ASPLOS 2024). PyTorch's blog announced Desmaison as the speaker for the featured NVIDIA GTC 2026 session "From Kernels to Clusters: How PyTorch Powers High-Performance AI," scheduled for March 2026.12345

At a glance

Current roles
Research Engineer +1 more
Companies
Meta, PyTorch
Sector
Company
Work listed
2
Sources cited
10
Profile reviewed

Career

Alban Desmaison is listed with Oxford University among the authors of the 2019 PyTorch paper. Desmaison now works on PyTorch as a research engineer at Meta.61

In July 2024 the PyTorch Core Maintainers accepted Desmaison's nomination to join them, a group the announcement describes as the final arbiters of technical decisions for pytorch/pytorch. In May 2026 the core maintainers voted to pass the lead core maintainer role from Soumith Chintala to Desmaison.78

Open-source work

Besides the lead role, PyTorch's governance page lists Desmaison as a maintainer of the torch.nn, torch.optim and torch.autograd modules, multiprocessing, and Build + CI. Desmaison is a co-author of the 2019 PyTorch paper and of the ASPLOS 2024 paper on TorchDynamo and TorchInductor, the components behind torch.compile.234

Talks and community

Desmaison was the listed speaker for the featured NVIDIA GTC 2026 session "From Kernels to Clusters: How PyTorch Powers High-Performance AI", scheduled for March 16, 2026, and served as one of the program chairs of PyTorch Conference Europe 2026, where Desmaison also took part in a session with PyTorch module maintainers. In May 2026 Desmaison joined the live Q&A panel for the PyTorch 2.12 release.591

Work and contributions

  • PyTorch Open-source code

    Listed as PyTorch's Lead Core Maintainer and as a module maintainer for torch.nn, torch.optim, torch.autograd, multiprocessing, and Build + CI; co-author of the 2019 PyTorch paper. The repository is under a BSD-style license.2310

  • PyTorch 2: TorchDynamo and TorchInductor (torch.compile) Published research

    Co-author, listed with Meta, of the ASPLOS 2024 paper introducing TorchDynamo and TorchInductor, which implement torch.compile in PyTorch 2.4

Timeline

  1. Co-authored the 2019 PyTorch paper, listed with the University of Oxford.36
  2. Co-authored the ASPLOS 2024 PyTorch 2 paper on TorchDynamo and TorchInductor.4
  3. Joined the PyTorch Core Maintainers.7
  4. Served as a program chair of PyTorch Conference Europe 2026.9
  5. Listed as the speaker for the featured PyTorch session at NVIDIA GTC 2026.5
  6. Announced as the new Lead Core Maintainer of PyTorch, succeeding Soumith Chintala.8

Where they work

  • Meta 106 people in the wiki
  • PyTorch 11 people in the wiki

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References

10 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026

  1. PyTorch 2.12 Release Live Q&A (May 20, 2026) — event pagePyTorch · Official page · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  2. PyTorch Governance | Maintainers (PyTorch 2.14 documentation)PyTorch · Documentation · published Jun 5, 2026 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  3. PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library (arXiv 1912.01703)arXiv · Paper · published Dec 3, 2019 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  4. PyTorch 2: Faster Machine Learning Through Dynamic Python Bytecode Transformation and Graph Compilation (ASPLOS '24)PyTorch · Paper · published Apr 2024 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  5. PyTorch at NVIDIA GTC 2026PyTorch · Announcement · published Mar 9, 2026 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  6. PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library (arXiv 1912.01703, PDF with author affiliations)arXiv · Paper · published Dec 3, 2019 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  7. Alban Desmaison and Piotr Bialecki are now PyTorch Core MaintainersPyTorch Developer Mailing List · Announcement · published Jul 16, 2024 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  8. Lead Core Maintainer ChangePyTorch Developer Mailing List · Announcement · published May 7, 2026 · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  9. PyTorch Conference Europe 2026: A Landmark Moment for Open Source AI in ParisPyTorch Foundation · Announcement · accessed Oct 21, 2026
  10. pytorch/pytorch LICENSE (BSD-style license)PyTorch (GitHub repository) · License · accessed Oct 21, 2026