Associate AI Engineer

Job Title: Associate AI Engineer

Location: Los Angeles (Hybrid)

About Core VC

Core VC is a top-tier venture capital firm investing in Seed/A fintech startups on a mission to create $1 trillion in new wealth for everyday Americans. We’ve made 100+ non-consensus investments across four funds, including unicorn bets in Ripple (decacorn), NerdWallet (IPO), Oportun (IPO), PayJoy, and Kikoff.

Opportunity

You'll work 1:1 with Core's Head of AI to design, build, and run experiments across sourcing, research, and our data platform. You won't be handed a backlog of tickets. You'll have a real say in what we build, what we test, and what we learn from it. Your job is to build software that helps us find those founders earlier, understand them better, make better investment decisions, and support them better once we've invested. We're a small firm that punches above its weight, and software is a big part of how.

Why Build AI at a Venture Firm?

Venture capital seeds the future, but still operates mostly the way it did 50 years ago. Every day, thousands of companies, founders, markets, and relationships change. Our raw material is messy and varied: pitch decks, meeting notes, call recordings, CRM history, company and hiring data. Our job is to turn that mess into good decisions. AI changes what's possible here, and we're early in figuring out how.

How We Build

You'll ship quickly and experiment aggressively. Complex systems are built on simple, reliable ones, and we've spent a lot of time building that foundation. Now we want to see how far we can push it. The more unusual or ambitious the experiment, the better.

A failed experiment is useful if we understand why it failed and what it teaches us about the next one. The right person can separate their ego from their work, kill bad ideas quickly, and double down when something works.

The team is small, in person, and low-ego. Paired programming is normal. Expect a lot of autonomy, a lot of responsibility, and a very short distance between an idea and production.

What We're Looking For

• 0 to 3 years of experience. New grads, researchers, and self-taught builders welcome.

• Experience building, experimenting with, or researching AI/ML

• Solid grasp of modern AI systems: LLMs, agent harnesses, agents, retrieval, and how to evaluate them

• Taste in picking problems: you can look at a pile of messy data and find the direction worth pursuing

• High bias toward action

• Comfort in ambiguous environments where the answer isn't obvious

• Willingness to do the boring work. Models and agents are only useful when the underlying systems and data work.

• A GitHub history that shows curiosity and interesting technical projects

• You use Claude Code, Codex, etc. as leverage, not as a substitute for thinking

• In office in Santa Monica 3 days a week

What You Don't Need

You do not need to come in as an expert in:

• Cloud infrastructure (AWS)

• Database modeling

• Data Engineering

• Venture capital
  

We can teach those. We care much more about whether you can think clearly, learn quickly, build things, and develop good technical instincts.

Why Join Us

• Impact: Be a foundational engineer building for the future of Venture Capital while contributing to our mission of creating $1T in net worth for the mass market

• Growth: Work in a dynamic, intellectually stimulating environment with ample opportunities for professional development and learning

• Ownership: Take significant ownership of projects and contribute directly to the strategic direction of the firm.

• Culture: Join a collaborative, supportive team passionate about tech innovation and backed by a proven track record of success