I build talent pipelines and recruiting tools for leading AI organisations, helping them hire top researchers, engineers, and generalists tackling the most consequential problems.

(Offline)Now,

Co-CEO at SteadRise.
Co-Founder of Secure AI Futures Lab.

8+ years sourcing and placing researchers and engineers across AI, ML, and deep-tech — including UK AISI, FAR.AI, and Apollo Research.

Featured Projects

AI Candidate Screening Pipeline

I build recruiting infrastructure including talent maps, screening pipelines, and sourcing tools so that the right candidates surface faster, and the hiring teams can spend time evaluating, not searching.

Sourcing researchers and engineers for teams building reliable AI systems — start with the talent map, build the pipeline, calibrate the bar, close the offer.

The work spans data-driven sourcing, RecOps infrastructure, and building the tools that tie it together — 50K-profile talent maps, LLM-assisted candidate triage, JD fingerprinting. Most of my time goes into making recruiting pipelines more systematic and less manual.

Built a 50,000-profile ML research talent map from 5 years of ICLR/ICML/CVPR proceedings. Harvested 100+ data sources — conferences, Olympiads, GitHub, Codeforces — into an 80K-record dataset at >90% accuracy. Vector embeddings for candidate matching, weighted scoring across 10 skill dimensions.

Scaled a recruiting funnel from scratch to 4,200 warm ML, SWE, and Quant candidates across 5 continents. Partnered with hiring managers at 13+ organizations to scope roles, calibrate bars, and close 26 offers across FAR.AI, UK AISI, and Apollo — securing 12 accepted placements.

Co-founded Secure AI Futures Lab with $250K+ via Schmidt Sciences and AI Security Tactical Opportunities Fund. Convening government, academia, and industry across India and APAC. Partnering with IITs and IISc on AI for Science, Social Good, and Trustworthy AI.

Managed the development of an AI evaluation pipeline (Claude API + Airtable) scoring candidates across 20+ binary signals with tri-verdict logic. Leading product for Measuremint — a voice-first career agent using ElevenLabs + Claude for AI interviews.

Upcoming

Want to chat? Find me at these places

Apr 23 – 27, 2026

ICLR 2026

International Conference on Learning Representations

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Jul 6th – 11th, 2026

ICML 2026

International Conference on Machine Learning

Seoul, South Korea

Dec 6th - 12th 2026

NeurIPS 2026

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

Syndney, Australia

Varun Agrawal

Some of my Collaborators

UK AISI
FAR.AI
Apollo Research
World Bank
J-PAL
Schmidt Sciences
UK AISI
FAR.AI
Apollo Research
World Bank
J-PAL
Schmidt Sciences