Farivar moved with his family to Pakistan in 1983. He obtained a degree from Harvard University in 1994 and subsequently worked as a business reporter for Dow Jones Newswires. According to his LinkedIn resume, as of 2013 he was Chief of the Afghanistan Service at VOA and based in Washington, D.C. Previously he was with Internews Network and spent the 2011-2012 academic year as a Knight Fellow at Stanford University.