Head of AI

Job description

ABOUT PRIMARY Primary is a seed-stage venture capital firm dedicated to delivering exceptional support to the founders of transformational businesses. By pairing meaningful investment resources with the largest portfolio impact team of any seed investor, our portfolio companies have reached an industry-best seed-to-A graduation rate. ABOUT THE ROLE We believe the next durable advantage in venture will not come from access to the same models and tools available to everyone. It will come from the intelligence created through our relationships: what a customer says, the reference on a candidate, the pattern a partner recognizes across dozens of operator conversations. Today, too much of that signal disappears after a call or remains trapped in disconnected systems. We are building the AI-native operating system that allows it to compound. We are hiring a Head of AI to help build that operating system and, in the process, help shape how Primary operates for the next decade. This isn't a "make things a little more efficient" mandate: AI already touches how we source, diligence, win deals, and how we support our portfolio companies. This hire is about turning an effort that is already well underway into a durable, firm-wide advantage. The right person will be part engineering leader, part product thinker, and part entrepreneur - working closely with Brian, Ben, Brad, and leaders across the firm to shape the strategy together. You'll sit at the epicenter of how Primary uses AI to compete at the highest level of venture, with a mandate to generate real alpha - better deals sourced, won, and supported, and stronger outcomes across our portfolio. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Set vision and strategy with firm leadership. Work closely with senior leaders and teams across investing, portfolio impact, and firm operations to identify the highest-leverage opportunities of AI. Translate that shared direction into a focused, evolving plan tied to firm outcomes. - Own the roadmap and the results: Build and maintain a clear roadmap for Primary's AI product surface, track progress against it visibly, and prioritize ruthlessly. Define the metrics that matter for AI's impact on firm outcomes and hold the team accountable to them. - Build the platform foundations: Lead the development of the shared context and data layer that systematically captures the information the firm creates and makes it safely accessible to AI. Establish the common infrastructure, evaluation methods, and technical primitives that allow AI products to be trustworthy and reusable across Primary. - Go deep on AI, and build when it matters: Stay fluent in LLMs, agents, context/retrieval layers, evals, and the broader model landscape. Evaluate tradeoffs across approaches, lead engineers credibly, and get hands-on with prototypes or production work when necessary. - Turn workflows into products: Develop a detailed understanding of how investors and operators actually work. Find the real problem beneath the request, move quickly from observation to prototype, and ship products that earn adoption because they materially improve decisions and outcomes. - Enable others to build: Create the tools, standards, and support that allow people closest to the work to build their own agents on top of shared foundations. Help the best ideas become reliable, discoverable, and useful to the broader firm. - Drive cross-functional cohesion: Partner across investing, portfolio impact, and operations teams to understand workflows and drive firm-wide integration of AI. Connect work happening across the firm, reduce duplication, and make tradeoffs and ownership clear. - Lead the team: Direct the day-to-day work of engineers, analysts, and other contributors; recruit additional talent as needed; and create a culture of technical excellence, speed, accountability, and high judgment. - Communicate clearly: Make the strategy, roadmap, technical choices, risks, and results legible to both non-technical partners and engineers, in writing and in person. ABOUT YOU - You have 7-10+ years of experience building meaningful technical products or systems. You may have been a founder, engineering leader, AI product engineer, technical product leader, or most likely - some combination of the above. The exact title matters less than the evidence that you can build and lead. - You have deep, current, hands-on fluency with LLMs, agents, context/retrieval layers, evals, and the model landscape - you're a genuine student of the craft, not someone who dabbles on occasion or has only managed it from a distance. - You have a track record of taking ambiguous, zero-to-one opportunities and turning them into products that people adopt and that create measurable value. - You combine strong product judgment with technical depth. You understand users at the level of their actual behavior, can identify the highest-leverage problem, and know when to prototype, build, buy, or stop. - You think like an entrepreneur: you create momentum with incomplete information, recruit others into an ambitious future, and take personal responsibility for the result - not just the roadmap. - You have experience navigating complex organizations with senior, opinionated stakeholders, and building alignment without formal authority. - You're energized by continuously re-architecting how an organization works, and excited to do that inside a venture firm rather than a traditional tech company. - You are a crisp written and verbal communicator, comfortable moving between technical and non-technical audiences. - You are genuinely motivated by impact, ownership, front-row access to bleeding-edge AI, and the chance to build a capability that can shape Primary for years to come.