Tech and AI Lead

Founders Factory; Greater London; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Founders Factory seeks a Tech and AI Lead to help define and build new ventures, shaping AI-first products and scalable tech for startups in our portfolio. You will guide cross-functional teams, turn ideas into MVPs within months, and embed AI capabilities from day one to accelerate time-to-market.

Based in London, you will work across Studio and Accelerator ventures, balancing hands-on execution with strategic leadership while shaping architectures, tooling, and vendor choices for multiple

Qualifications

• Proven ability to deliver products in a fast-paced tech startup environment.
• Experience with modern AI tooling and architectures.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction and lead development of new ventures and products.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to turn ideas into a product MVP within 6 months.
• Bring an AI-first lens to product and technical decisions from day one.
• Identify where AI-native workflows can reduce time-to-MVP and time-to-validation.
• Lead the development and testing of technical hypotheses including AI as a core product/operating model.
• Design, build, and maintain internal AI tooling and infrastructure for portfolio teams.
• Provide regular technical mentorship to accelerator founders and teams.
• Capture learnings into reusable best practices and processes.
• Run 1:1 surgery sessions with founders to unblock challenges and feed back learnings.
• Work across Studio and Accelerator ventures across multiple domains.

Skills

AI tooling

Generative AI

Agentic systems

AI strategy

Product mindset

Hands-on execution

Vendor evaluation

Technical founder

Job description

Hey, we're Founders Factory

Founders Factory builds and funds startups together with exceptional entrepreneurs and the world's leading companies. Headquartered in London, Founders Factory backs visionary founders with capital, dedicated support from a team of 60+ operators, and unrivalled access to a coalition of industry leading corporate partners. Since 2015, our 400 portfolio companies have raised $1.03bn follow-on funding from leading investors in four continents.

Who are we looking for?

We’re looking for a technical lead to build with and support our portfolio of startups with a mix of hands‑on execution and strategy. You’ll collaborate with a diverse portfolio of ambitious early‑stage founders - this is an opportunity to work across various domains, technologies, and products with a particular focus on helping ventures identify and capture the advantage that modern AI tooling now makes possible, without losing sight of the fundamentals of building resilient, scalable technology.

In our venture studio, you will have the unique opportunity to help define, and build new ventures from scratch, in sectors ranging from finance to healthcare, with the support and backing of the largest corporate partners in the world.

Our vision is to build a body of knowledge that will become the global blueprint for how to build the leading technology businesses of the future. We are looking for someone who shares that ambition and has the passion and expertise to achieve it.

Your responsibilities

As a Tech and AI Lead, you will work across both our Studio and Accelerator as a technical expert, turning new ideas into tangible outcomes and helping founders build AI capability into the core of their products and operations - not as a bolt‑on feature.

To be successful in this role, you should have previous experience leading teams to build secure, resilient and scalable tech and data science solutions.

Building new ventures from scratch

We expect that you will be working across several Studio businesses at all times, around 1-2 days/week of support for each.

• Set the technical direction and provide technical expertise to help shape a big vision for each venture by leading the development and implementation of new ventures and products

• You will work with cross‑functional teams for each studio venture and act as the key technical stakeholder. Alongside the team, you will turn ambiguous ideas into a product MVP within 6 months, validating your decisions commercially along the way, so that a founding team can grow from that MVP into a fully‑fledged business.

• Bring an "AI‑first" lens to product and technical decisions from day one of a new venture, rather than retrofitting AI capability later.

• Identify where AI‑native workflows can compress the time‑to‑MVP and time‑to‑validation for new Studio ventures.

• Lead the development and testing of technical hypotheses for the companies you support, including where and how AI can be a core part of the product or the operating model

Internal Tooling and Applied AI Infrastructure

• Design, build, and maintain internal AI tooling and applied AI infrastructure that Studio and Accelerator teams can leverage

• Reduce duplicated effort across ventures by turning recurring technical problems into shared internal tools.

• Codify what works into reusable best practice: architecture patterns, evaluation frameworks, prompting and agent‑design guidelines, and vendor/tooling assessments.

• Rapidly prototype and pressure‑test new AI capabilities and tools before recommending them for adoption across the portfolio

Advising the Accelerator portfolio:

• Run regular 1:1 "surgery" sessions with Accelerator founders and their tech leads, providing tailored technical mentorship and unblocking specific challenges

• Ensure learnings from each team & project are brought together to feed back into consistent best practices and processes for the new startups we’re building

• Provide technical mentorship for the members of the tech team

Required skills, competencies and experience

• Proven ability to deliver products in a fast‑paced tech startup environment, including recent experience building with modern AI tooling

• Experience across a variety of technical and AI solutions, including generative AI and agentic systems

• Proven experience in developing and executing AI strategies that align with business objectives

• You have a strong product and customer mentality. You care deeply about building products balancing speed and scale

• Being able to switch between hands‑on execution and strategic advice, as needed.

• Experience evaluating and integrating third‑party AI tools and vendors, and making sound build‑vs‑buy calls in a fast‑changing market

• Previous experience as a technical founder of an early stage startup is preferred

We value

• Quick thinking and intuition, someone who can balance creativity with objective data

• Deals comfortably with the uncertainty of change and complex problems, effectively handles risk and can make a decision with incomplete information

• Operates effectively, is calm under pressure and productive when plate spinning or when the future is unclear

• Have a strong bias for action and persists in accomplishing objectives despite setbacks (the hard thing about hard things is that they are f**king hard)

• Able to understand the perspective of others and evaluate their own thinking whilst looking for feedback and continuously improve

• Ability to work across geographies, time zones and multi‑functional teams

• Coaching and mentoring others on technical aspects