Full-Time
Head of Engineering
Posted on 10/31/2025
AI Fund
11-50 employees
Venture studio launching AI-based startups
No salary listed
San Francisco, CA, USA
Hybrid
 Engineering Management (1) |
|---|
- 8+ years engineering experience, incl. 3+ years leading teams in high-growth B2B-SaaS companies
- Fluency in our stack (React/Next.js, Python/FastAPI, Postgres, Redis, Docker/Kubernetes)
- Proven record of scaling systems to thousands of concurrent users and introducing observability
- Deep, applied expertise in building sophisticated products on top of modern AI APIs (Retrieval-Augmented Generation, evaluation frameworks, agents, etc.)
- Significant personal use of AI for development (Cursor, Replit, Windsurf, Claude Code, etc.) and ability to reimagine end-to-end systems with AI
- Significant startup experience
- Engineering degree, ideally from a top institution
- Leads by example— set the standard for technical excellence, code daily, conduct thoughtful code reviews
- Architects for the future and delivers for the present— lead the scaling of our system to support 10x users, while increasing reliability and observability
- Is a master of applied AI engineering—architecting sophisticated systems on top of modern AI APIs to solve complex legal problems with high reliability and performance
- Guides a high-performance team— drive hiring, onboarding, and developing our engineering talent, fostering a culture of ownership, intensity, and collaboration to attract and retain top performers
- Systematically improves engineering velocity and quality— mature our CI/CD pipelines, increase test coverage, and improve release processes, without bogging the team down in bureaucracy
- Is a strategic business partner— translate complex technical concepts and trade-offs into clear business implications for founders, product leads, and GTM teams, ensuring technical strategy is always aligned with customer value and company goals
- Makes difficult trade-offs between speed, robustness, and cost, always prioritizing user impact
- Helps strategize & lead on roadmap, tech choices, and SOC 2 Type II compliance.
- Communicates crisply with founders, PMs, design, and GTM to keep everyone rowing one direction
- Finds ways to leverage AI to maximally improve the development process
- Legal or LegalTech experience
- Strong DevOps skills on Azure (or AWS/GCP with quick ramp-up)
AI Fund is a venture studio that creates and launches AI-based companies. It partners with innovators and tech pioneers to develop startups that apply artificial intelligence to solve problems in fields such as manufacturing, mental health, maritime shipping, and education. It acts as a minor co-founder, offering resources, strategic guidance, and investment to help entrepreneurs move ideas from concept to reality quickly. Unlike traditional funds, it builds companies around AI-enabled business models and shares equity stakes in the ventures it helps create and grow. Its goal is to advance practical AI applications and drive meaningful impact by helping early-stage startups scale and succeed.
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
$425.3M
Headquarters
Palo Alto, California
Founded
2017
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- Led $2.8M IrisGo.AI seed; Acer pre-loads software globally.
- Portfolio spans maritime, mental health, education via AI applications.
- IrisGo.AI targets 1M daily users, $2M ARR by end-2026.
What critics are saying
- AI.FUND diverts European AI founders from AI Fund deal flow.
- Menlo's $100M Anthology Fund poaches talent with Anthropic access.
- IrisGo.AI Series A by June 2026 dilutes AI Fund's stake.
What makes AI Fund unique
- AI Fund acts as minor co-founder in venture studio model.
- Andrew Ng founded AI Fund with $370M backing from Sequoia, NEA.
- Founder in Residence program validates ideas rapidly with domain CEOs.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Wellness Program
Professional Development Budget
Paid Vacation
401(k) Company Match
Remote Work Options
Company News
Profitmind, today announced a $9 million Series A financing led by Accenture Ventures.
BizTrip AI has raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding, bringing its total raised to $2.5 million. The round was led by RRE Ventures, with participation from AI Fund, BAG Collective, BAG Ventures and Correlation Ventures. Sabre also participated, having announced an investment and partnership with BizTrip AI in January to develop AI corporate travel assistants. The startup, recognised as a PhocusWire Hot 25 Travel Startup for 2026, will use the funds for product development, engineering hiring and customer growth initiatives. BizTrip AI is building AI capabilities designed to reduce friction for business travellers whilst delivering cost savings and improved compliance for organisations in what CEO Tom Romary describes as "one of the most complex and inefficient operational categories for modern companies.
IrisGo.AI, a startup developing AI personal computer software, has raised $2.8 million in seed funding led by AI Fund, the venture studio founded by AI pioneer Andrew Ng. The Taiwanese company has secured Acer as its first OEM partner, with its software to be pre-loaded on devices. IrisGo.AI differentiates itself through a "contextual awareness engine" featuring persistent memory that learns user preferences, hybrid computing using local NPUs for privacy-sensitive tasks, and tool orchestration across existing applications. Its "Watch and Learn" feature allows users to demonstrate tasks once, which the AI then automates whilst keeping data processing local. The funding will accelerate IrisGo.AI's market expansion as the AI PC market is projected to exceed 100 million units annually. The startup plans to announce partnerships with two additional PC manufacturers in late 2026.
AI butler IrisGo nets $2.8m, eyes series A after CES buzz. IrisGo, a US startup building a "digital butler" for PC users, has closed a US$2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng's AI Fund, the startup confirmed to Tech in Asia last week. The company is valued at US$21 million. Jeffrey Lai, IrisGo's co-founder and CEO, says he's already in talks with new investors for a potential series A round of around US$20 million. The company hasn't set any specific timeline for the series A, though it expects June "to be a good candidate." The startup will use the funds for product development. It recently hired four new engineers, though Lai emphasizes that he wants the team to stay lean due to the heavy involvement of AI coding tools such as Claude Code. Lai and his team demoed IrisGo's desktop butler app at CES in Las Vegas earlier this month, showing off features such as screen recording as well as mouse and keyboard controlling. The app ran on laptops built by Acer, a launch partner for IrisGo. "We're getting a lot of traction after CES. What we did there proved that we're able to attract new investors for a potential series A round," Lai tells Tech in Asia. Acer devices with IrisGo's app preinstalled are scheduled to ship globally by the end of this month. Three more launch partners are expected to come in the following months, Lai adds, though he declined to disclose names. IrisGo also plans to make the app available to download publicly for any devices running Intel's AI-focused Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and similar processors. Having the app preinstalled could help IrisGo reach users at scale with minimum expenses, says Lai, noting that the startup did not pay to have its AI butler installed on its partners' computers. Any revenue will come from user subscriptions. IrisGo plans to offer both free and premium tiers, the latter at US$20 per month. The startup expects to have 1 million daily active users by the end of 2026 through Acer's ecosystem. Taking into account a 10% conversion rate, this would generate around US$2 million in annual recurring revenue, Lai estimates. IrisGo vs. Copilot? Most laptop makers are aggressively promoting devices with Microsoft's Copilot built in. This means users will have access to multiple AI assistants preinstalled on new laptops. Lai isn't concerned about users choosing one over the other, as he believes Copilot and IrisGo serve different purposes.
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