Salvatore Candido is an engineering fellow and vice president, technology. He was previously a co-founder and the chief technology officer of EvolutionaryScale. He has built frontier AI models in a number of domains, recently with a focus on biology, protein design, and scientific reasoning in large language models. At EvolutionaryScale, he spearheaded or made foundational technical contributions to all of the company’s flagship research efforts.
Dr. Candido earned a doctorate from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for work in control systems and artificial intelligence. His previous roles include distinguished software engineering posts at Meta and Google, and chief technology officer at Project Loon. Dr. Candido was a co-lead of the AI for math and science pillar at FAIR at Meta, and was the technical lead who created the AI-based algorithms used to navigate autonomous lighter-than-air aircraft for Project Loon at Google[x]. Prior to Project Loon, Dr. Candido worked on the Google Search algorithm.