Frontier AI talent intelligence
A founder-led search partner for labs, infrastructure teams, and research companies entering their next phase.
Brief the founderOur thesis
The strongest research operators rarely appear in familiar recruiting channels. They move through private recommendations, technical communities, and quiet founder networks.
Labs need a search partner who understands model training, evaluation, systems, safety, and the people who make those teams credible.
Asteria builds trust before a mandate exists, giving founders a warmer path to researchers and engineers who are not actively looking.
How we work
Engagements
A retained partnership that adds Asteria as an extension of your founding team. We keep a live map of the frontier AI research community and build relationships before roles are public.
A focused mandate for a single critical hire. We combine technical calibration, discreet outreach, and market evidence to reach candidates your team cannot access alone.
Track record
Research engineering
A systems researcher moved from a large lab to a small interpretability team after a six-week founder-led search.
Inference systems
A founding infra leader joined a post-training startup after a market map across serving, compilers, and inference economics.
Safety research
A niche evals team hired a research manager from outside the obvious peer set by reframing the mandate around scientific taste.
Meet the founder
Mara Voss founded Asteria after advising research founders on their first senior hires. The work is deliberately narrow: AI researchers, systems engineers, evals leaders, and the operators who help them ship.
The best search work feels less like recruiting and more like patient market intelligence.