Joel Pobar is a technologist and engineering leader known for his work on software platforms and artificial intelligence projects. He has held senior roles at major technology companies, including leading infrastructure and engineering at Anthropic and serving as a senior engineering organizational leader at Meta, where he worked on AI initiatives including PyTorch and was associated with the superintelligence team. In March 2024, he joined venture capital firm TEN13 as its inaugural Venture Partner, focusing on AI investments. ^[1]

Education

Joel Pobal completed a Bachelor of Information Technology with Honours in Computer Science at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) between 1999 and 2001. ^{[3] [4]}

Career

Pobar began his career at Microsoft, where he served as a Program Manager on the Common Language Runtime (CLR) team. During his time there, he contributed to various aspects of the .NET platform, including late-bound dynamic CLR features and APIs, the Shared Source CLI (Rotor) program, Generics, and Dynamic languages. Following his tenure at Microsoft, he worked on high-performance, high-scalability .NET software solutions for clients in sectors such as investment banking, government, and Fortune 500 companies.

He later spent over a decade at Meta, where he held a senior engineering organizational leadership position. At Meta, his work included contributions to artificial intelligence projects, notably the open-source deep learning framework PyTorch. He was part of the team focused on superintelligence efforts.

Subsequently, Pobar moved to Anthropic, an AI company specializing in foundation large language models. At Anthropic, he leads infrastructure and engineering projects.

In March 2024, Pobar took on an additional role as the first Venture Partner at TEN13, a venture capital firm. This appointment aligns with TEN13's strategic focus on artificial intelligence as a key investment area. In this capacity, Pobar is expected to contribute insights from his experience in frontier AI and help shape TEN13's global AI investment strategy, leveraging the firm's network of co-investors.

Regarding his role at TEN13, Pobar stated, "Having closely collaborated with the TEN13 venture team, I am confident in their strategic vision and drive. I am excited to share insights from my first-hand experience working on frontier AI and contribute to TEN13's global AI investment strategy, leveraging their extensive co-investor network."

Throughout his career, Pobar has been involved in significant software development projects. At Microsoft, he played a role in the development of the .NET CLR and related technologies. His work at Meta included contributions to the PyTorch AI framework.

He is also active in the .NET community, having written blog entries and articles for publications such as MSDN magazine. He has been a regular speaker at Microsoft technology conferences. In 2010, he presented at the GOTO conference in Aarhus, Denmark, on the topic "Smart Software with F#," discussing the application of functional programming languages like F# to implement collective intelligence algorithms such as PageRank, machine learning, and data mining techniques. ^{[2] [1] [3] [4]}