I work on the systems we don't yet know how to govern.
I'm Varun Varia. I split my time between building the serving infrastructure behind modern AI and writing about the gaps between what we claim to control and what we actually do.
The route here was the usual zigzag. I grew up in Nashik, learned how to be independent in Pune at my first job, learned how to ship software at scale for investment banks in Kuala Lumpur, landed in the United States via Charlotte, and now live in Austin. Somewhere along that arc I picked up a working obsession with the systems we deploy faster than we understand — and the institutional structures we either build or fail to build around them.
Today I lead AI and Data Security at Hyland as a Senior Manager. Before this I spent four-and-a-half years as a Senior Data Scientist at Shippo (2021–2026), and a year at FedEx as a Data Scientist (2020–2021). My first real engineering job was at FinIQ in Kuala Lumpur (2015–2018), building software for investment banks. The through-line across all of it has been the same: when a system gets complicated enough that no one fully understands it, you need both better tools and better stories about it.
- · LLM serving infrastructure & cost
- · Agentic evaluation and red-teaming
- · Governance of long-horizon autonomous systems
- · The reading experience of technical writing
- Hyland — Senior Manager, AI & Data Security 2026 — now
- Shippo — Senior Data Scientist 2021 – 2026
- FedEx — Data Scientist 2020 – 2021
- FinIQ — Trading software, Kuala Lumpur 2015 – 2018
The kind of essays I want to write require a brain that's been outside. So when I'm not at a keyboard you'll usually find me on a trail or, occasionally, falling out of a sky.
The best photo I have of myself was taken by my friend Anil at 14,000 feet, four days into the Har-ki-Dun trek in the Indian Himalayas — the trek that taught me the journey actually does outrank the destination. The most stupid thing I've done is volunteer to be the first rookie out of the plane on a skydive over Singapore: five seconds of freefall counted out loud, then seven minutes of descent that took nine, with the city sliding past below. The most heart-throbbing was a bungee jump into an 83-meter valley near Rishikesh, after a long Royal Enfield ride from Dehradun. None of it shows up directly in the essays, but it's where most of the better thinking happens.
