Unusual · Posted 4w ago
AI Engineer - Unusual Ventures
- Location
- 🇺🇸 San Francisco Bay Area, United States
- Contract
- Full-time
- Role
- ML engineering
- Source
- Employer’s own job board (Lever)
Stack
- LLM
- Python
- TypeScript
The posting
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.
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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.
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Diligence support. Workflows that speed up market maps, competitive analysis, customer-call synthesis, and memo drafting — without losing rigor.
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Firm knowledge. Making what the firm already knows (thousands of founder and customer conversations, past memos, playbooks) searchable and useful.
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Operations automation. Removing manual work from portfolio reporting, LP updates, and back-office processes, in partnership with the CFO/O and VP Finance.
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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
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Product taste: you talk to users, find the real problem, ship something small, and iterate
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Experience working with messy real-world data (CRMs, email, calendars, third-party data providers)
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Clear communicator who can explain tradeoffs to non-technical partners and earn their trust
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Self-directed: comfortable setting priorities with light direction Nice to have •
Experience building internal tools or intelligence products at a VC firm, investment firm, or data-heavy operations team
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Early-stage startup experience, or time as a founder
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Familiarity with venture or enterprise software GTM
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Experience with recruiting or people data
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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.
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Build, don't just integrate. Buy off the shelf when it's the right call; build when the problem calls for it.
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In person. We work together in the Bay Area office. Being close to the people using your tools is part of the job.
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Founders first. Everything we build should ultimately make us more useful to the founders we back.