Mary Chesus

Program Managers play a unique and powerful role as Alphabet AI-research lab DeepMind progresses towards its mission of ‘solving intelligence’ - they navigate ambiguous, fast-moving, complex research breakthroughs and organisational transformation projects, and partner with other leaders and managers to create the conditions required for healthy, high performing teams that produce pioneering work at the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence. Mary leads a team of 100 program managers and team coordinators. She’s defined and shaped the program management role to match the company’s need for dynamic project management, expert coaching and development of some of the world’s leading AI researchers and engineers. She’s pioneered how to increase technical and domain understanding as the company takes on new challenges in diverse fields, from achieving state of the art performance in video game environments to using the power of AI to unlock one of the biggest mysteries in biology in predicting how 3D proteins fold. Mary’s strength is bringing the full power of her management and leadership skills to complex, highly technical environments. A highly trusted partner and coach, she is one of our 1000-person organisation’s most senior and effective managers. Prior to joining DeepMind in 2017, she led the technical program management team at Waymo, the Alphabet company focused on bringing the first self driving car to public roads in the US. She also led project management for Google Cloud’s Reliability team, which is responsible for improving responsibility across over 100 services with more than 1 billion users, supported by more than 1000 engineers; and managed Google’s domain registry product from conception to public launch. She began her career in financial and economic research following a degree in economics and economic development from the University of California, Berkeley.