At focal, we exist to back the world's best technical founders first.

We're laser focused on investing at inception: First to see talent. First to build conviction. First to back founders building the impossible.

Now we’re looking for someone cut from the same cloth as those we back to help us reimagine how a venture firm operates in the age of AI.

Why now

Venture has never been more competitive. Yet the industry still runs on spreadsheets, gut instinct, and relationships built over expensive dinners - with some AI bolted on.

The next great venture firm won't just use AI. It will be AI-native from the ground up - seeing sooner, deciding faster, and building systems that compound across every founder, deal, and outcome. That's how a 5-person team beats a 50-person firm.

We're building that firm. You'll own how it gets built.

The role

This is a long-term, high-impact founding role with meaningful financial upside (carry in funds) and ownership over how the firm is built. You'll join as our 5th team member and partner closely with our GPs in a flat structure.

Your core responsibility: Build and own the AI-native operating system that becomes our structural edge. That means:

1. Systems that let us operate like a 50-person firm
2. Sourcing engines that surface founders before anyone else sees them
3. A “brain” that compounds how we make better decisions, faster
4. A platform that extends to our portfolio - with you as a peer to 100+ technical founders

You'll work at the edge of what's possible with language models, embeddings, and retrieval systems - owning the roadmap and architecture for what an AI-native firm looks like. This is a hard challenge to get right, which should make the right person even more excited.

At most firms, this role is a cost center. At focal, it is an edge. The systems you build will define how we compete for the next decade.

Over time, this role and your leadership scope can grow in line with your impact on our firm.

Who you are

A founder-type. A builder: Highly technical, deeply curious, high-output, high-agency.

You move from idea → architecture → shipped - fast. You want real ownership over process and outcome, not a seat at someone else's table. You've built things from scratch that worked, and you can point to them.

This role is defined by pace of learning, density of decisions, and surface area of impact. If that's how you already operate, keep reading.

On top, you see intensity as a feature, not a bug: We work hard. We move at startup speed. We set the bar high and expect the same from you.

Importantly, this is not just another "Head of AI" role. We obsess over finding the best founders in their fields - the same bar applies here: You're someone we'd back as a technical founder.

Who we are

focal is an institutionally-backed, next-generation venture firm. We have big plans for where we want to take our firm and want you to push towards them alongside us.

Currently investing out of fund II (2025 vintage), we lead at the start, often pre-incorporation, with up to $1M.

Ambition, drive, boldness, and integrity. It’s how we’re building our firm. It’s whom we back:

• Bold missions: The surface area for machine intelligence is nearly infinite. We back founders pursuing the most asymmetric opportunities in AI-native software
• ‍Technical builders: We gravitate to strong technical founders / teams building with unmatched speed and intensity
• ‍Across North America: We partner with founders throughout the US and Canada from our hubs in SF and Miami
  

We show up for the people we back, we never stop learning, and we play the long game.

The logistics

We want to win. To show up at our best, we put the right support system in place - the resources, trust, and compensation to do it well. The role comes with:

• Carried interest in our funds (your financial upside is meaningfully tied to the long-term success of every founder we back and every dollar of returns we generate)
• Cash compensation commensurate with experience and impact
• 100% paid healthcare, 401(k), 6 weeks PTO, and 3 months paid parental leave
• Budget for tools, compute, office needs, and experimentation

We’re a remote team across Miami, SF, and Nashville with frequent in-person time. You’ll have the option to work remotely or in person alongside us, up to you.

Let's do this!

AI is the defining opportunity of our generation - transformative, urgent, and filled with possibilities yet to be explored, especially within venture capital.

This is a rare chance to be part of building a generational venture firm at a true inflection point.