Venture Studio Tech Lead

Founders Factory; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Founders Factory is seeking a Tech Lead to partner with a diverse portfolio of startups, turning ideas into tangible AI-enabled products. You will guide both Studio and Accelerator teams, building secure, scalable tech and data science solutions while embedding an AI-first mindset from day one.

You’ll work across multiple ventures, setting technical direction, mentoring teams, and shaping architecture patterns and internal tooling.

Qualifications

• Recent experience delivering products in fast-paced tech startups with AI tooling.
• Proven ability to develop and execute AI strategies aligned with business goals.
• Experience evaluating and integrating third‑party AI tools and vendors.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction and shape a big vision for each venture by leading development of new ventures and products.
• Lead cross-functional teams as the key technical stakeholder to deliver an MVP within 6 months.
• Bring an AI-first approach to product and technical decisions from day one.
• Identify AI-native workflows to accelerate MVP and validation timelines.
• Lead development and testing of technical hypotheses for portfolio companies, focusing on AI as a core product/operating model.
• Design, build, and maintain internal AI tooling and infrastructure to support Studio and Accelerator teams.
• Run regular mentoring sessions with Accelerator founders and tech leads to unblock challenges and share best practices.

Skills

AI tooling

Generative AI

Agentic systems

Product leadership

Hands-on coding

Mentorship

Vendor evaluation

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 Tech Lead to build with and support our portfolio of startups with a mix of hands-on execution and strategy within our venture studio. 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 Venture Studio Tech 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