Metaview is building the AI agent colony for recruiting 🌐

CV Deep Dive

Today, we’re talking with Shahriar Tajbakhsh , Co-founder and CTO of Metaview.

Metaview is a working on revolutionizing recruiting workflows by enabling seamless collaboration between biological and silicon intelligence. Built from the ground up to automate the repetitive and manual tasks that dominate recruiting today, Metaview’s goal is to help organizations streamline their processes and make smarter hiring decisions. By operationalizing conversations— the most valuable and underutilized data asset in recruiting—Metaview unlocks new workflows that scale far beyond conventional systems.

Since its founding, Metaview has gained the trust of tens of thousands of users at companies like a16z, Quora, Brex, and Sony. Its AI-powered tools are helping recruiting teams eliminate inefficiency, enabling recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers to focus on high-impact decision-making rather than mundane tasks.

In this conversation, Shahriar shares the origins of Metaview, the challenges of designing software for both human and AI users, and the company’s vision for reshaping the future of recruiting with AI.

Let’s dive in ⚡️

Read time: 8 mins

Our Chat with Shahriar 💬

Shahriar - welcome to Cerebral Valley. First off, introduce yourself and give us a bit of background on yourself and Metaview. What led you to found Metaview?

I’m Shahriar, Co-founder & CTO of Metaview. At Metaview, we’re building a platform where biological and silicon intelligence seamlessly collaborate to help organizations supercharge their recruiting workflows by 100x. I’d be happy to unpack what this means in more detail later.

My academic background is in Computer Science, and I’ve spent my career building software products. I started with low-level infrastructure for high-frequency trading, then built a consumer app to turn pocket money into life lessons. At Palantir, I worked on some of the toughest problems modern enterprises face. Now, at Metaview, I’m helping organizations make smarter decisions when recruiting and building their teams—leaving less up to chance.

The story of Metaview’s founding spans over a decade, but if I had to summarize it:

1. I met my co-founder, Siadhal, at another company, where we discovered we worked incredibly well together and brought complementary strengths to the table.

2. Together, we formed a hypothesis: hiring decisions are the most important decisions organizations make.

3. I tested this hypothesis during my time at Palantir and realized that even the best hiring machine on the planet wasn’t operating anywhere near its full potential. Siadhal came to the same conclusion independently during his time at Uber.

4. It became clear to both of us that solving this problem would be the most impactful thing we could do with our time.

5. At that point, not starting to build would have felt irresponsible—and so, Metaview was born.

Our founding secret was that conversations hold the overwhelming majority of context, and to reimagine recruiting, we’d need to capture and operationalize those conversations. Fast forward through years of pain, grind, and countless ups and downs, and what was once a contrarian idea is no longer as radical as it initially sounded.

How would you describe Metaview to the uninitiated developer or AI team looking for AI-native recruiting solutions?

Today, recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers spend most of their time on toil—tasks that are manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, and devoid of enduring value. Worse yet, this toil scales linearly as companies grow. Metaview is the anti-toil company, focused entirely on recruiting workflows.

We’re building a platform to automate this toil away, one task at a time. We started by creating the world’s #1 AI scribe for recruiting—a critical first step that gave us access to the most impactful data asset in any enterprise: conversations. By operationalizing the context within these conversations, we’ve unlocked a wealth of new workflows across the recruiting problem space, and we’re methodically tackling each one.

Who are your users today? Who is finding the most value in Metaview? 

Metaview is trusted by tens of thousands of users worldwide at organizations like a16z, Quora, Brex, AngelList, Sony, Replit, and Humane. Recruiters and recruiting leaders are usually the first to see immense value from Metaview. Over time, recruiting teams often expand its use across the organization, allowing interviewers and hiring managers to experience its magic for the first time.

What sets Metaview apart from other players in the recruiting space?

Everyone is building speciesist products. We’re not. Most players in the recruiting space today are still building for the past. At the core of hiring are human interactions, but until now, it’s been technically impossible to fully capture and operationalize these interactions. As a result, the world settled for the best it could create within these constraints: highly lossy databases for tracking interactions. Current systems of record are incomplete and poorly represent the reality of how hiring actually happens. 

Metaview, by contrast, is built from first principles to treat reality’s context as a first-class citizen. Our record of reality is designed to mirror reality itself—this is the new ontology, the new data model for hiring. The most significant consequence of this approach is that it enables us to build AI agents that augment and automate human decision-making and action.

While other players in the space (and in many others) are still building Postgres wrappers, we are building a platform designed from the ground up for both humans and AI. Our system gives both forms of intelligence access to the same tools and interfaces, enabling unprecedented collaboration and efficiency.

Given the excitement around new trends in AI such as Agents and Multimodal AI, how does this factor into your product vision for Metaview?

We’ve always been customer-first and trend-last. That said, it just so happens that the latest trends in AI unlock unimaginable value for our customers—allowing us to truly reimagine how they get work done. And when I say “reimagine,” I mean it literally, not in some hyperbolic, “I’m a founder” kind of way.

What has been the hardest technical challenge around building Metaview into the platform it is today?

One of the hardest technical challenges has been re-wiring our thinking to design software that treats human users and AI users equally. This isn’t just a matter of neuroplasticity—it’s also because there are no established patterns or methodologies to follow. Nearly all existing software assumes the user is either human or machine, but rarely both. You typically get rectangles (user interfaces) or API endpoints, with a significant gap between the capabilities these two interfaces provide.

Building Metaview from first principles to create a consistent experience for both humans and AI has been a uniquely difficult challenge—but it’s also one with compounding rewards as the platform evolves.

How do you see Metaview progressing in the next 6-12 months? How do you see the product evolving?

As I mentioned earlier, the first problem-space we tackled with Metaview was note-taking, where we built the world’s #1 AI scribe for recruiting. Over the next 6–12 months, with a larger team, we’re focusing on leveraging our core data asset—conversations—to build the next set of killer apps for recruiting teams. While I can’t share too much about our upcoming releases, we’re creating collaborative surfaces where humans and AI work together to achieve results that are 10x to 100x better than before.

In this era of seismic shifts driven by AI, we’re only interested in shipping products that deliver at least a quantifiable 10x upside for our customers. It’s tempting to get sidetracked by the “easy BS SaaS stuff” like optimizing onboarding flows or squeezing a few extra percentage points out of a funnel, but we actively resist that urge. Instead, we’re focused on building industry-redefining products and features. It’s harder—much harder—but it’s also the right thing to do. The upside is simply mind-blowing.

How would you describe the culture at Metaview? Are you hiring? What do you look for in prospective team members?

Yes, we’re hiring! We’re looking for Product Engineers who are passionate about their craft and believe that only losers don’t ship on Fridays.

A great way to get a feel for our culture is by checking out the “Slackbook” section on our careers page. Slackbook is an internal mini-product we built to capture the moments that make Metaview unique. Anytime someone says something funny (or even not-so-funny) on Slack, anyone can react with a 🔖 emoji, and the message is automatically added to our careers page. It’s a lighthearted way to give people a glimpse of life inside Metaview.

Slackbook also reflects who we are: a team that loves building, shipping, and having fun along the way. If that resonates with you, we’d love to hear from you!

Conclusion

To stay up to date on the latest with Metaview, learn more about them here.

Read our past few Deep Dives below:

• Langtrace - your AI-native observability solution 🎛

• Cleric - Your AI SRE teammate 🌐

• VESSL AI - Building the Future of AI Agents 🌐

• Pulze is transforming how enterprises harness AI ⚡️

• Tavus is revolutionizing AI-powered video 🎥

If you would like us to ‘Deep Dive’ a founder, team or product launch, please reply to this email ([email protected]) or DM us on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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