Venture Studio Tech Lead in London

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.

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.
• Building new ventures from scratch, 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.
• Work with cross-functional teams for each studio venture and act as the key technical stakeholder.
• Turn ambiguous ideas into a product MVP within 6 months, validating your decisions commercially along the way.
• Bring an 'AI-first' lens to product and technical decisions from day one of a new venture.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Strong product and customer mentality, caring deeply about building products balancing speed and scale.
• 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, balancing creativity with objective data.
• Comfort with the uncertainty of change and complex problems, effectively handling risk and making decisions with incomplete information.
• Ability to operate effectively, remaining calm under pressure and productive when managing multiple tasks.
• Strong bias for action and persistence in accomplishing objectives despite setbacks.
• Ability to understand the perspective of others and evaluate their own thinking whilst seeking feedback and continuously improving.
• Able to work across geographies, time zones and multi-functional teams.
• Coaching and mentoring others on technical aspects.