Warm Referrals

Message an OpenAI or Anthropic Engineer for a Referral

Cold applications to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor vanish into a queue of thousands. A 30-second reply from one current engineer moves you further than any polished cover letter.

Find Your Warm Intro →

Free · No sign-up · See results in ~10 seconds

A plain LinkedIn search buries the people who would actually help you.

It ranks by prominence, so the most-followed, most-messaged names sit on top. FindWarmIntros surfaces the coworkers who share your school or a past employer - the people most likely to reply - and hands you a ready-to-send intro.

Example - what you’ll see

Someone who works at your target company

🎓 Same university as you · 💼 Shared past employer

🔥 Strongest

A recruiter at your target company

🎓 Same university as you

🎓 Alumni

✍️ Ready-to-send intro“Hi - we both studied at [your school]. I’d love to hear about your path to a company you are targeting before I apply…”

… plus everyone else in your network who can put in a good word.

See who can refer you in - pick a tech target:

Short answer: Find a current engineer who shares your school, a past employer, or an open-source repo with you, then send a short message that names the shared thing first and asks one specific question about their team. Do not ask for the referral in message one. Ask what their team actually works on, listen, then request the referral once they have context on you. A referral routes your application to a recruiter directly, which is why it beats the public form.

Find the right engineer, not the most senior one

Skip the VP of Engineering and the recruiters. You want a current individual-contributor engineer on or near the team you would join, because they can speak to the actual work and their referral carries weight with the hiring manager. Search LinkedIn for the company plus a title like 'Member of Technical Staff' or 'Software Engineer', then filter for someone you share a real connection with: same university, a former employer in common, or a repo you both contributed to.

At Anthropic and OpenAI, many engineers list their GitHub or a personal site. Cursor is small enough that a single engineer often owns a feature you can reference by name. That shared thing is your entire opening, so pick the person where it is strongest, not the person with the biggest title.

Write the message that earns a reply

The mistake is leading with the ask. Lead with what you share and make responding cost them almost nothing. Keep it under six sentences and ask exactly one question.

Open with the shared thing. 'We both did the CMU distributed systems track' or 'I saw you built the Cursor tab-completion, I have been reverse-engineering how it stays that fast'. This is why they read past line one.
Ask about the team, not the job. 'What does your team actually own day to day, and what surprised you after joining?' People love talking about their work and it costs 30 seconds to answer.
Prove you are worth referring. One line: a shipped project, a benchmark you improved, an eval you wrote. Concrete, not adjectives.
Leave the referral for later. Do not mention it in message one. Ask it only after they reply and you have traded a note or two.

Where FindWarmIntros fits

The slow part is the finding and ranking: scanning hundreds of current OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor engineers to spot the handful who share your school or a past employer, then guessing who is most likely to reply. FindWarmIntros does that part for you. You enter a target company and it surfaces the real people you have a genuine connection to, ranks them by how warm the path is, and drafts an opener that leads with what you share. You still send the message and build the relationship, but you skip the hour of manual filtering. It is free to try.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I ask for a referral in my first message?

No. A cold referral ask from a stranger is easy to ignore. Ask one specific question about their team first, trade a reply or two so they get context on you, then ask. The referral feels earned instead of extracted.

What if I do not share a school or employer with anyone there?

Manufacture a real, narrow connection instead. Reference a specific talk they gave, a repo they maintain, or a blog post they wrote, and comment on the actual technical content. Vague praise reads as spam; a precise observation about their work reads as genuine.

How does a referral actually help at these companies?

A referred application is flagged to a recruiter and often reviewed by the hiring team directly, rather than sitting in the public applicant pool. At OpenAI and Anthropic, where openings draw thousands of applicants, that routing is frequently the difference between a screen and silence.

How long should I wait before following up?

Give it about five business days, then send one short, friendly nudge that adds something new, like a relevant project you just finished. Send exactly one follow-up. If there is still no reply, move to a different engineer rather than pushing the same person again.

Keep going

Find Your Warm Intro →