Warm-Intro Onto a Research Team at OpenAI or Anthropic
Cold-applying to a research role means competing with thousands of resumes a hiring manager never reads. The honest path is shorter: find the one researcher who shares your lab or school and give them a 30-second reason to forward you.
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.
✍️ 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:
Why the careers portal is the wrong door for research roles
AI research hiring runs on reputation and referral, not keyword-matched resumes. A hiring manager at OpenAI or Anthropic gets pinged by teammates about people whose work they respect, and those names jump the queue before the portal pile is ever opened.
Your edge is not that you applied. It is that someone already inside the lab can vouch that your research is real. Shared academic lineage (a common advisor, lab, or coauthor) is the fastest way to earn that vouch, because it gives the researcher a genuine reason to spend two minutes on you.
How to find and reach the right researcher
Do not message the recruiter. Message a researcher on or near the team you want, and pick the one with whom you share something specific and true.
- Map the shared thread first. Same PhD lab, same advisor, same university, a paper you both cite, or a workshop you both attended. Specificity is what makes the message land.
- Read their recent work before you write. Name the paper or result that overlaps with yours. A researcher can tell in one line whether you actually read it.
- Lead with the thread, attach one artifact. Open with the shared lab or school, then link one thing (a paper, a repo, a reproduction) that proves you can do the work.
- Make the ask cheap. Ask who owns hiring for the team or whether they will glance at your work, not for a formal referral. A 30-second favor gets a yes.
Let FindWarmIntros do the finding and ranking
The slow part is figuring out which researchers at a lab actually share your school, past employer or academic circle, and which are reachable rather than a director who never replies. FindWarmIntros is a free tool that searches a target company for the real people who overlap with you, ranks them by how strong the shared thread is, and drafts a warm intro you can edit.
It handles the finding-and-ranking so you spend your time on the part only you can do: reading their work and writing a message that sounds like a person, not a form.