Title: AI Analyst
Location: San Francisco, CA (in-person)
Reporting Structure: Reports directly to GP, Shruti Gandhi
Company Description
Array Ventures is a pre-seed B2B deeptech fund that invests in technical founders from Day 0 to Series A. With $250M+ AUM across 4 funds and 80+ investments, two-thirds of Array's portfolio companies have gone on to raise from top-tier investors including a16z, Sequoia, Accel, IVP, and Menlo Ventures, and have exited to F500 companies like PayPal, Amazon, and Apple.
They do not vibe-invest. The team dives into technical stacks, reads research papers, and evaluates the actual defensibility of what founders are building. They back hardcore AI, data, security, and infrastructure companies. The boring-but-beautiful stuff that actually makes the world run.
Array also runs an in-house AI Lab where the team experiments with frontier tooling and builds internal systems alongside their portfolio. Think: a startup inside a VC. You get real ownership, no red tape, and direct access to Shruti and the broader network from day one.
Quick Facts
- $250M+ AUM across 4 funds
- 80+ portfolio companies; 2/3 have raised follow-on rounds from a16z, Sequoia, Accel, and more
- Successful exits to PayPal, Amazon, and Apple
- Processes 200-300 inbound deals per month, evaluated with AI-powered tooling
- Target: 9-10 investments per year, with 2-3 quality founder intros surfaced per week
- Active check size: $250K to $2.5M at inception
- Focus areas: AI infrastructure, Cybersecurity, HealthTech, FinTech, and enterprise SaaS
- Team of 4: flat, fast, and founder-empathetic
Responsibilities
This is not a coffee-and-spreadsheets analyst role. You are joining a four-person team at a pivotal moment in Array's growth, which means you will have real ownership across sourcing, diligence, and fund operations from week one. Day to day, that looks like:
- Source deals from two distinct pools: young builders (recent grads, hackathon participants, alumni networks) and experienced operators leaving AI labs or top companies to go build something
- Attend in-person events, hackathons, and community gatherings in San Francisco to build and maintain a live founder pipeline
- Programmatically build and iterate on internal tools to make sourcing smarter and faster, using the latest AI tooling
- Evaluate inbound and outbound deals with genuine technical depth: read the research papers, interrogate the architecture, pressure-test the market thesis
- Write tight investment memos that capture the technical reality and the business opportunity without losing the nuance
- Support the GP with operational tasks to keep the fund running while the investment team focuses on deals
- Make meaningful intros connecting portfolio companies and founders to investors, customers, and talent
- Contribute to Array AI Labs experiments and internal tooling workflows
Is This You?
You are still in a technical role, or just left one. You go to hackathons because you want to, not because someone told you to. You have opinions about AI tooling the rest of us have not heard of yet, and you have the GitHub commits to back it up. You think sourcing is a systems problem, and you have already started building the solution.
- Young, hungry, and self-directed: you generate urgency from the inside, not the outside
- Technically sharp: you can evaluate a deep tech stack, read a research paper, and spot the gap between what a founder says and what their system actually does
- Connected: you have a real network of builders, recent grads, and founders-in-the-making, not just LinkedIn connections
- Builder mentality: you have shipped something from 0 to 1, and you can prove it
- Comfortable holding many things at once: sourcing, diligence, ops, and community all land on the same plate
- Genuinely excited about enterprise AI, not just the hype, but the infrastructure, the data problems, the security challenges
- Individual contributor mindset: you want to do the work, not manage it
Preferred Qualifications
- Software engineer at a high-signal startup such as Decagon, Sierra, Perplexity, or similar frontier AI companies
- CS degree from a top-20 program: MIT, Stanford, CMU, Berkeley, and similar
- Active in the SF AI community: attends hackathons, knows the scene, shows up
- Part of a VC fellowship program such as Khosla Fellows, Kleiner Fellows, Foundation Fellows, Bessemer Fellows, or a16z Fellows
- Angel investing experience or demonstrated VC interest beyond just applying to analyst roles
- Hands-on experience using and building with frontier AI tools, not just describing them
- Strong written communication: you can turn a complex technical idea into a crisp one-pager
- Bonus: active builder presence online, writing, building in public, or contributing to open-source
What We Are NOT Looking For
- Candidates from Array Ventures portfolio companies
- Candidates from large incumbents: NVIDIA, Apple, Google, Meta, or similar
- Candidates already working in a formal VC role who are not actively building or coding
- Anyone whose interest leans toward Web3, real estate, or consumer social
- Managers looking to manage: this role is an IC position
Interview Process
- Recruiter Screen with HigherPeople
- Hiring Manager Screen with Shruti Gandhi
- Coding Assessment
- Deal Sourcing and Evaluation Case Study
- On-site Interview in San Francisco
#Perks
- Direct mentorship from GP Shruti Gandhi: fast feedback, no sugarcoating, full investment in your growth
- Front-row seat to 200-300 deals per month across the most interesting AI and deeptech companies being built right now
- Access to Array's network of top VCs, F500 corporate partners, and 80+ portfolio founders
- Real ownership from day one: you are in on every decision, not siloed into a function
- In-person in SF with a tight-knit, high-trust team of 4
- A seat inside Array AI Labs, one of the most active applied AI experiments in the VC world
- This role is built to last: Array wants someone who grows with the fund, or uses it as a launchpad to build their own company