Jobs

Head of AI & Automation
Founders Circle Capital — San Francisco, CA (On-site)
About Founders Circle Capital
Founded in 2012, Founders Circle Capital is a growth-stage venture firm managing ~$1.5B in assets. We invest in leaders: today's fastest-growing private technology companies. Not only with capital, but with The Circle, a private leadership community of 500+ CEOs and CXOs navigating the unique challenges of scaling from product-market fit to hyperscale. “In service of” is the organizing principle of everything we do, from how we invest in and serve founders, CEOs and executives. The Circle operates as one of the most valuable peer networks in technology.
Our portfolio spans 100+ companies including Databricks, Applied Intuition, DoorDash, Hashicorp, Twilio, and Dollar Shave Club, among others. 22 of our companies have gone public.
Now we're rethinking how we work.
The Role
When we look across the last decade of venture capital, the firms that won did so by developing an information advantage: they saw companies earlier, understood markets more deeply, and showed up for founders in ways that competitors couldn't replicate. AI changes the surface area of what's possible on all three dimensions — and we're looking for someone to help us seize it.
This is not a research role or a consulting role. It's a building role. You'll be the first person at FCC dedicated to AI and automation, with a mandate to design, ship, and iterate on the tools and systems that make us a sharper investment firm and a better partner to founders.
You'll work directly with the partners and across the firm across deal sourcing, portfolio operations, and The Circle, with the autonomy to go deep where you see leverage. And you have the judgment and high agency to know where to start.
The ideal candidate has lived in both worlds: you understand how AI systems are built and how venture capital works. You don't need a product manager to translate priorities or a senior engineer to unblock them. You move fast, finish things, and build the next version based on what you learn.
What You'll Build
Deal Intelligence. The best deals are won before most investors know they exist. You'll build systems that surface emerging companies earlier — automated market mapping, signal detection across data providers (PitchBook, Harmonic, Crunchbase), and diligence workflows that compress research time without sacrificing quality. You'll help the partners develop investment theses faster and with greater confidence.
Portfolio Operations. FCC has an extensive portfolio. You'll build monitoring and synthesis tools that keep the partners meaningfully informed across the portfolio — automated ingestion of company updates, KPI tracking, public signal aggregation, and early warning systems for companies that need support before they ask for it.
The Circle Platform. The Circle is FCC's most differentiated asset — 500+ CEOs and CXOs in an active peer community. You'll build the intelligence layer that makes it more valuable: matching and recommendation systems that connect the right people at the right moment, content curation, event intelligence, and tools that help community managers operate at greater scale.
Firm-Wide Productivity. You'll identify and eliminate the highest-friction workflows across the firm — CRM automation, document generation, meeting synthesis, research retrieval — building agentic systems that give everyone back the time they'd otherwise spend on repetitive work.
How You'll Work
Other firms describe the ideal profile well: Full-Stack AI (build end-to-end, own the full stack from model to UX), Engineering > Research (apply existing models to real problems; utility over novelty), Product-Minded (translate user intent into system design), and Prototype to Scale (prove concepts fast with demos, then refactor for stability). That's the operating mode here. Build and ship things. Experiment constantly.
We'd add: you'll do this inside a firm with deep founder relationships, proprietary community infrastructure, and a genuine appetite to operate differently. That context is a feature, not a constraint.
What We're Looking For
You have strong software engineering fundamentals and can build full-stack systems — you're fluent in Python and across the modern AI stack (LLM APIs, agentic frameworks, RAG pipelines, vector stores, workflow orchestration). You've shipped things that people actually use.
You understand venture capital — not necessarily as an investor, but well enough to know what matters. You've worked at a VC firm, a VC-backed startup in a strategic role, or at a data platform (AngelList, PitchBook, Harmonic, Crunchbase) where you developed intuition for how investment decisions get made and what information is valuable.
You have product instincts. You don't just build what's asked — you figure out what should be built. You ask why before you ask how. You're comfortable with ambiguity and don't need a detailed spec to get started.
Specific experience that maps well: product management at a technical company, data engineering with ML application, AI engineering in a startup context, or a technical platform/operations role at a financial services or investment firm.