Lightning AI has expanded its executive leadership team with the appointments of Heather Paduck as Chief Financial Officer, Betty Junod as Chief Marketing Officer, and Jarlath Doherty as Chief People Officer. The three executives join the New York-based AI cloud company as it expands its infrastructure and software operations following its merger with Voltage Park earlier this year.
The appointments will strengthen Lightning AI’s financial management, global marketing, and talent development capabilities as the company scales its vertically integrated artificial intelligence platform.
Lightning AI completed its merger with Voltage Park in January 2026, combining its AI model development and training platform with a substantial GPU infrastructure business. Following the combination, Lightning AI operates more than 40,000 NVIDIA GPUs across nine U.S. data centers.
The combined platform enables customers to access computing infrastructure alongside software tools for developing, evaluating, and deploying AI models. Lightning AI is seeking to provide an integrated alternative to organizations that otherwise manage AI computing resources and development software separately.
Paduck will oversee Lightning AI’s global financial strategy, including financial planning, accounting, treasury, and capital strategy. Her responsibilities will include supporting investments in GPU infrastructure and data center capacity as the company expands to meet customer demand.
She brings more than 25 years of financial leadership experience across data centers, real estate, and infrastructure serving hyperscale and enterprise customers.
Paduck previously served as CFO of STACK Infrastructure, a developer and operator of data centers. She also held CFO positions at Northwood Investors, a global real estate private equity firm, and Pembroke Real Estate, a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments.
Her background in data center financing and real estate investment provides experience relevant to Lightning AI’s infrastructure expansion. As the company increases its computing capacity, its capital strategy will play an important role in supporting additional GPU deployments and data center operations.
Junod will lead Lightning AI’s global marketing and communications organization, with responsibility for strengthening the company’s market positioning, expanding enterprise and developer engagement, and accelerating its commercial growth.
She previously served as Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President of Heroku at Salesforce. Her earlier experience includes marketing leadership positions at VMware Tanzu, Docker, and solo.io.
Junod brings extensive experience marketing enterprise software, open-source infrastructure, and developer platforms. At Lightning AI, she will focus on communicating the capabilities of the company’s integrated hardware and software platform to enterprise customers and AI developers.
Her appointment is also intended to support Lightning AI’s enterprise go-to-market strategy and product-led growth initiatives.
Doherty will oversee the company’s global people organization, including talent acquisition, employee development, compensation and benefits, and workplace operations.
He has more than 20 years of experience building and scaling human resources functions at high-growth technology companies.
Doherty previously served as Chief People Officer at Squarespace and Collibra, where he supported the data intelligence company’s global workforce expansion. He also held global talent leadership positions at LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Deloitte.
His responsibilities at Lightning AI will include developing the organizational infrastructure and talent strategies needed to support the company’s growing operations.
The three appointments follow a period of expansion for Lightning AI as it integrates Voltage Park’s infrastructure capabilities with its existing AI development platform.
The company’s technology is built around a unified hardware and software environment that supports AI development across cloud, hybrid, on-premises, and air-gapped deployments.
Lightning AI is also the company behind PyTorch Lightning, an open-source framework designed to simplify AI model development and training.
Its customer base includes enterprise teams and AI-native companies such as Cursor, Reflection AI, and Black Forest Labs.
By combining its software platform with a large fleet of NVIDIA GPUs, Lightning AI aims to support customers throughout the AI development process, from initial experimentation and model training to evaluation and operational deployment.
The additions to its executive team will support that strategy by strengthening the financial, commercial, and organizational capabilities required to operate an integrated AI cloud business.
KEY QUOTE:
“We’re thrilled to welcome Heather, Betty, and Jarlath to bring their strategic leadership and operational strength in building for our next phase of growth.”
Sam Yagan, Executive Chairman of the Board at Lightning AI
