Samar Varma

I'm currently a software engineer at Arpio. I graduated from UC Davis in June 2026 with a degree in Computer Science, where I spent most of my time outside class helping grow the student tech community.

Outside of work, I’m an at-home barista and an AMC A-lister. I also like to read, ski, and lift.

I’ve always been curious. My parents love to tell a story from one of my brother’s swim classes. Ten minutes in, they lost track of me. After a few minutes of panicked searching, they found me happily talking to kids and parents I had never met. Even then, I had an instinct to connect with people, and it has stayed with me ever since.

In high school, I put that energy wherever I could: student council, mock trial, DECA, film club, and Boy Scouts. Serving as class senator for three years was my first fulfilling leadership experience. Years later, when I found myself leading a much larger student organization, that part felt familiar.

After graduating high school, I entered UC Davis as an Economics major because I was interested in human behavior. I liked the questions it asked, but the emphasis on theory felt removed from the people behind them. I wanted a way to stay close to those people and make something in response to what I learned.

Product management gave me that. I joined AggieWorks, a student-run tech organization at UC Davis, as a Product Manager and switched my major to Cognitive Science. I was still thinking about behavior, but now I could connect it to a real product, a real decision, and eventually a real person using what we made.

But the closer I got to building, the more I wanted to understand the technical work itself. That summer, I worked as a software engineer at Riveron (formerly at Yantra), developing supply-chain dashboards for a few of their clients.

By my second year, I had switched to Computer Science and gone all in on building RoomU, a roommate-matching app. We launched the product and put it in front of real users. We listened to them and kept iterating on the product in response. I started to understand how important the user voice was in engineering and product decisions.

In my third year, I became VP of Product and handed RoomU to other members. My attention moved from refining one product to thinking about how the whole organization learned to build. I wanted every team to make more considered product decisions and ship more refined products. That meant supporting teams as they took new products from 0 to 1 while helping established products gain traction through data-driven decisions and growth marketing.

I cared about the quality of what we shipped, but the people behind it mattered just as much. AggieWorks had given me room to learn, and I wanted other students to have that room too.

As President, I focused more directly on the experience of the people inside AggieWorks. We invested in socials, retreats, and professional-development sessions alongside the internal work that kept the organization running. Seeing other members find ownership and fulfillment in their work became more gratifying than succeeding on my own.

We also created larger spaces for the community around us. The UC Davis Tech Mixer brought together more than 500 students across 35 clubs, while ProdCon brought in more than 100 competitors and eight industry speakers. When one of our products hit PostHog’s rate limit, I cold emailed them because we were trying to avoid paying for the service. They responded by giving us access to their startup plan. That conversation grew into a partnership and PostHog’s first university event. A few months later, they used the same playbook for their first student ambassador program.

What drew me to spend my last two summers of college at Arpio was how real the problem felt. Their product helps businesses make their cloud infrastructure resilient. We moved fast and took real ownership. I saw our impact firsthand as software I built generated leads and helped prospects become clients. This also introduced a new set of constraints. Downtime, competing priorities, and code quality could carry immediate consequences in an enterprise setting. My experience made me more deliberate about what needed to work now and what we could improve. Making those decisions showed me that I was most fulfilled in engineering, where I could carry an idea all the way into working software.

For a long time, I thought software had to feel perfect before it launched. Now, I think a product needs core functionality that solves a real problem that people are actually experiencing. The best way to know if it does is to put it in front of them, listen, and iterate. Their voice belongs inside the engineering and product process. The craft is in making sense of what we see, then deciding what to improve.

Along the way, my definition of building widened. It includes writing code, but it also includes bringing people together around what matters and creating an environment where they can do good work.

That wider definition has also clarified what I want from the work ahead. I want to own a meaningful part of what reaches people and understand the systems underneath it well enough to build thoughtfully.