Warm Intros

Get a Warm Intro Into a Frontier AI Lab

Cold applications to top AI labs vanish into a queue thousands deep. The honest path: reach one researcher who already has a reason to vouch for you, and make saying yes take 30 seconds.

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 someone inside the research org who shares a real tie with you, a coauthor, a former lab, an advisor's network, or a school, then reach out leading with that shared thing, not the ask. Point to one concrete piece of your work (a paper, a repo, a reproduction) that maps to what their team publishes, and ask for a short call or a pointer to the hiring manager. A referral from inside the org routes your application past the automated screen.

Map the research org before you touch the application portal

Frontier labs hire into specific teams: interpretability, alignment, pretraining, evals, systems. The portal hides this, but the org's own papers do not. Read the last six months of their publications and note the author lists. Recurring names are the people who set direction and whose word carries weight in hiring.

Your goal is not the most famous author. It is the second or third author who is close to your level, works on exactly your subarea, and shares a concrete tie with you. That person will actually read your message and can walk it to the hiring manager.

Find the tie, then lead with it

A warm path exists when there is a real, checkable reason the other person should help you. Rank your candidates by the strength of that tie, and open with it in the first line, never with the request.

Coauthor or shared venue. You both published at the same workshop, or you share a coauthor one hop away. Say so and name the paper.
Same former lab or advisor. A shared PhD lab, an internship at the same group, or the same advisor gives you standing most cold applicants never have.
Reproduced or built on their work. If you reimplemented their method or extended their benchmark, that is the strongest opener there is, it proves you can do the work and that you care about theirs.
School alum in the org. A shared program is a weaker tie than a coauthor, but it still beats cold and gets your email opened.

How FindWarmIntros does the finding-and-ranking for you

The slow part is the mapping: pulling the author lists, checking who overlaps with your school or past employers, and ranking who is actually reachable. FindWarmIntros does that finding-and-ranking step, it surfaces the real people inside a target research org who share a school or a past employer with you, ranks them by how warm the path is, and drafts an intro that leads with the shared thing.

It does not send anything for you and it does not invent connections. You still write the honest first line and point to your own work. The tool just removes the hours of manual lookup so you spend your effort on the one message that matters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is a coauthor tie really stronger than a referral from a recruiter contact?

Yes. A recruiter routes your resume into the same pile everyone else is in. A coauthor or former labmate inside the research org can put your name in front of the hiring manager with a personal note, which is the signal that actually moves a decision at a frontier lab.

What do I send a researcher I have never met?

Three sentences. First, the shared tie by name (the paper, the lab, the reproduction). Second, one concrete link to your own work that maps to their team's area. Third, a small, specific ask: a 15 minute call or a pointer to who is hiring. Make helping you cost 30 seconds.

I do not have papers at a top venue. Can I still do this?

Yes. A clean reimplementation of their method, a reproduction of a result, or a sharp writeup of where their benchmark breaks all demonstrate ability without a publication. Researchers respond to people who clearly engaged with the actual work.

How many people should I reach out to?

A handful, chosen well, not a mass send. Pick two or three people with the strongest ties and write each a message that could only have been written to them. One real warm path beats fifty templated cold ones.

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