AI Engineer - Unusual Ventures

Role Summary

About Unusual

Unusual Ventures is an early-stage venture firm that partners with exceptional enterprise software founders from pre-seed through Series B. We work hands-on with founders on go-to-market, customer discovery, and recruiting, with one goal: helping companies find product-market fit.

We want AI built into how we source, evaluate, support, and run the firm — not bolted on.

We're hiring our first AI Engineer to build the internal systems that can help our small team operate with scalable leverage. You'll work across the firm — investing, talent, platform, founder services, finance and operations — finding the highest-leverage problems, then designing, building, and shipping tools people use every day.

You'll be our first engineer. That means real ownership and a lot of trust, and it also means you'll set the technical standards, choose the stack, and decide what's worth building.

This is a builder role. We care more about solving the underlying problem well than wiring together the newest APIs. You'll have real ownership, direct access to partners and operators, and a short path from idea to production.

From time to time you'll also work directly with portfolio companies: helping founders scope an AI feature, pressure-test their technical approach, or stand up an internal workflow.

What You'll Build (Example projects for your first year)

• Talent intelligence. Agents and pipelines that find, enrich, and rank engineering and GTM talent for our portfolio — working closely with our Talent Partner to turn our recruiting judgment into repeatable systems.
• Sourcing and research. Tools that surface promising companies and founders early, and context-aware research assistants that draw on our CRM, notes, meeting history, and market data to prep partners before a first meeting.
• Diligence support. Workflows that speed up market maps, competitive analysis, customer-call synthesis, and memo drafting — without losing rigor.
• Firm knowledge. Making what the firm already knows (thousands of founder and customer conversations, past memos, playbooks) searchable and useful.
• Operations automation. Removing manual work from portfolio reporting, LP updates, and back-office processes, in partnership with the CFO/O and VP Finance.
• Portfolio support. Reusable AI playbooks and tools that our founder services team can deploy across portfolio companies.

What We're Looking For (Required)

• 3–6 years of software engineering experience, with at least 1–2 years shipping LLM-powered products or internal tools to production
• BS or MS in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Strong Python (TypeScript a plus); comfortable across the stack, from data pipelines and APIs to a simple, usable front end
• Hands-on experience with LLM APIs, retrieval, agents/tool use, and evaluation — and a clear view on when each is the wrong tool
• Product taste: you talk to users, find the real problem, ship something small, and iterate
• Experience working with messy real-world data (CRMs, email, calendars, third-party data providers)
• Clear communicator who can explain tradeoffs to non-technical partners and earn their trust
• Self-directed: comfortable setting priorities with light direction

Requirements

Nice to have

• Experience building internal tools or intelligence products at a VC firm, investment firm, or data-heavy operations team
• Early-stage startup experience, or time as a founder
• Familiarity with venture or enterprise software GTM
• Experience with recruiting or people data
• Public work — open-source projects, side projects, writing — that shows how you think and build

How We Work

• Small team, high leverage. Your tools will be used daily by the whole firm, and you'll see the impact directly.
• Build, don't just integrate. Buy off the shelf when it's the right call; build when the problem calls for it.
• In person. We work together in the Bay Area office. Being close to the people using your tools is part of the job.
• Founders first. Everything we build should ultimately make us more useful to the founders we back.

Additional Information

Send your resume or LinkedIn, plus a short note about something you've built with AI that people actually use — what the problem was, what you shipped, and what you'd do differently. Links to code or demos are welcome.