Job description
About the Role:
We’re launching a new venture in Generative AI and are seeking a founder-in-residence to lead it from concept to company. If you’re a builder with technical GenAI experience and a track record of building products from 0 to 1, this is your opportunity to shape a venture at the ground floor.
As the Founder-in-Residence, you’ll set the product vision, lead the technical execution, and serve as the face of the company. This role requires a unique mix of deep technical expertise, product intuition, business execution, storytelling, and leadership.
Who We Are:
AI is the new electricity. Just as it transformed entire industries 100 years ago, AI is poised to do the same today. AI Fund is a venture studio that co-founds companies alongside entrepreneurs, and we build companies from inception to market launch. Founded in 2017 by Dr. Andrew Ng, the $370 million-dollar funded venture studio is backed by top-tier VC firms and investors, and brings to bear the AI Fund teams’ combined experiences as AI pioneers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and builders.
Why Partner With AI Fund:
We’ve been there. We’ve founded and scaled successful companies ourselves, and we know that creating meaningful startups is really hard. We accelerate the company building process. Coming up with great ideas, turning the idea into a tangible product, assembling great teams, and helping raise capital is what we do. We shorten a process that can take years down to months. We make sure you are building a compelling product supported by great AI technology, and are surrounded by great teammates. But we also know that the process is not about us. It’s about great Founders and empowering them to do great things.
What We are Looking for:
- Technical Expertise:
- Hands-on experience building and deploying GenAI or ML-powered applications (e.g., ones involving components such as LLMs, agentic workflows, reasoning systems, chatbots, evals, etc.) )
- Full-stack engineering understanding with a grasp of scalable, cloud-native application architecture.
- Ability to architect and ship complex systems across frontend, backend, and infrastructure.
- Product & Startup Experience:
- Proven track record of building 0→1 products.
- Experience navigating ambiguity, iterating quickly, and building products from scratch.
- Team Leadership:
- Experience building, managing, or scaling high-performing teams.
- Strong leadership presence with the ability to inspire, align, and influence cross-functional teams.
- Go-to-Market Skills:
- Strong customer empathy — actively seeks out user feedback and integrates it into product decisions.
- Understanding of market dynamics and competitive positioning.
- Comfortable collaborating with sales, marketing, and GTM teams to shape product strategy and messaging
Bonus Points For:
- Experience presenting to investors or participating in capital raises.
- Deep knowledge or strong familiarity with our target industry (e.g., renewable energy, infrastructure, compliance, etc.).
- Previous co-founder or founding engineer of VC-backed software company.
Characteristics We Value:
- Accountability: an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions while doing so with the highest regard for integrity.
- Leadership: able to influence others to follow you and lead the team to a brighter future.
- Grit: able to stick with projects and work hard through good and bad times. High pain tolerance and can perform well under stress or pressure.
- Scrappy: Takes initiative and proactively gets things done with low resources, but doing creative things, begging, borrowing, and whatever is needed in an ambiguous environment or situation.
- Ownership orientation: Demonstrated orientation of extreme ownership over all aspects of the company and extremely results-driven in nature.
At AI Fund, we are committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation and related medical conditions), national origin, age, physical and mental disability, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, genetic information (including characteristics and testing), military and veteran status, and any other characteristic protected by applicable law. AI Fund believes that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. Selection for employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.
