Engineering Leader Usman Muzaffar Joins Arc Institute as Chief Technology Officer

Arc has appointed Usman Muzaffar as Chief Technology Officer. In this role, he will oversee the Computational Technology Center and Infrastructure teams, while advancing the Institute’s Virtual Cell Initiative, Arc’s full-stack approach to generating training data and building virtual cell models.

Usman brings over two decades of engineering and product leadership to Arc. He was previously SVP of Engineering at Cloudflare, where he led the team responsible for security and performance across millions of internet properties. Before that, he held senior software and product roles at Electric Cloud and then co-founded and became CTO of Selligy, a startup building tools for sales teams, later acquired by Veeva Systems.

Usman started as a medical student, built a career in software, consulted for biotech, and will draw on all of those experiences at Arc. “It wasn't until 2023, when I spent some time working as an advisor for BigHat Biosciences that I saw firsthand how much computational biology and AI are transforming the field,” he says. “I've lived through four major tech revolutions in my career—the PC, then client-server, then the web and cloud, then mobile. Each one completely changed everything and I think this fifth one, AI, is bigger than all four put together.”

Usman was immediately drawn to Arc’s model, which brings ML researchers and experimental biologists under one roof to tackle some of the hardest scientific challenges of our time. And the opportunity to help build frontier virtual cell models that tackle complex diseases with a group of brilliant people made joining an easy decision. “At my previous jobs, it was always about the customer,” he says. “Here, the ‘customer’ is honestly all of humanity.”

“I really like to learn by asking questions of people smarter than me,” he says. “I think the leader's role is to listen carefully to the team and understand what part of the puzzle someone is really good at, what part they are excited about, and how to create the environment, tools, and structure so people can do their absolute best.”

Usman will collaborate closely with Chief Scientific Officer Megan van Overbeek on bringing together Arc’s five Technology Centers to realize the ambitions of the Institute’s Virtual Cell Initiative and Alzheimer’s Disease Initiative, parallel efforts to build an experimental and computational framework capable of identifying meaningful therapies for Alzheimer's and, ultimately, for other complex human diseases. He succeeds Dave Burke, who will continue to partner on the Institute’s AIxBio projects and serve on Arc’s AI Advisory Board.