Anjor Kanekar
I help companies build elite technical organizations through hiring systems design and FDE-style organizational structure.
I write about what actually works in hiring—based on 7 years at Palantir, 1,000+ interviews, and building teams at Protocol Labs and multiple startups.
Currently running an experiment: rebuilding plasma physics simulations using AI to test whether intelligence explosion is real.
Featured in The Pragmatic Engineer on implementing Forward Deployed Engineering.
Popular Writing
Hiring & Organizations
- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Hiring Assholes — Why conviction and ego are separate traits
- Comand AI: A Hiring Case Study — How we designed hiring for mission-driven engineers
- Context Matters: Hiring is Not Fungible — Why generic hiring processes fail
- Case Study: Building a Hiring Process for Northslope — Defining cultural traits vs role competencies
AI Experiments
- Testing the Intelligence Explosion — Can AI turn one physicist into a research team?
- Building a Gyrokinetics Code Without Reading a Single Line — The development log
About Me
PhD in Computational Physics. 7 years at Palantir as a Forward Deployed Engineer and hiring manager. Built engineering teams at Protocol Labs (onboarding 2+ petabytes to Filecoin) and Radiant AI.
I've conducted over 1,000 technical interviews and trained hundreds of interviewers. I built hiring systems that scaled from seed-stage startups to established companies.
Now I help ambitious companies build hiring systems that actually work and structure their engineering organizations around customer outcomes.
I'm also rebuilding my old plasma physics simulations using AI assistance—testing whether "intelligence explosion" is real by seeing if AI can accelerate research velocity.
Work With Me
I help companies at three levels:
Design your hiring system (one-time project)
Provide interview capacity (monthly retainer)
Lead your hiring function (embedded partnership)
Quick start: Email me at me@anjor.xyz