Investment Associate
RemoteUnited States
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About MCJ
MCJ is an early-stage venture capital firm supporting startups overriding critical bottlenecks in the physical economy — challenges made urgent by climate change, rising AI demand, and increasing geopolitical tensions. We focus on energy, infrastructure, and industrials, backing founders that see the next system first.
The Role
We’re hiring an Associate to join the MCJ investment team. This role will drive and scale MCJ’s sourcing engine. You’ll build and run the systems that find the earliest, most interesting founders in energy, infrastructure resilience, and industrial automation. You will also own thematic research end-to-end, and lean in on diligence work across our investment portfolio. You will be on the forefront of building AI tools and workflows that make MCJ faster and sharper.
What You’ll Do
Sourcing & Pipeline (50%)
- Own MCJ’s proactive sourcing motion across our three mandates: firm power, operate-under-stress infrastructure, and industrial throughput
- Monitor research labs, DOE/ARPA-E grants, patent filings, university spinouts, and founder activity for pre-company and stealth-stage signals
- Build and maintain thematic pipeline maps (e.g. “every team working on microgrids,” “distributed energy storage networks”) and keep them current as the landscape shifts
- Run first conversations with founders and represent MCJ credibly in early outreach
Tooling & Systems (25%)
- Design and maintain the AI-enabled workflows that power sourcing and diligence — using tools like Claude, Harmonic, and others to structure messy datasets, monitor signals at scale, and cut manual research time
- Build lightweight internal tools/scripts/prompts that the investment team can reuse (e.g. competitive landscape generators, memo templates, screening frameworks)
- Start and scale lists, saved searches, and CRM pipeline data clean, current, and genuinely useful — not just maintained for its own sake
- Continuously evaluate new AI/data tools and bring the ones worth adopting into the team’s workflow
Diligence Support (25%)
- Partner with GPs on diligence for companies that clear the top of the funnel: market sizing, competitive landscape, reference calls, and technical/founder background checks
- Write clear internal memos on emerging themes, founder backgrounds, market shifts, and specific deal opportunities
- Help prepare materials for investment decision discussions and contribute a point of view, not just data
Who You Are
- Can be new to venture capital and startup operations in a professional capacity but have been following the space closely out of personal interest
- Technical background (CS, data engineering, physics, energy systems, materials science)
- Deeply involved in your university’s climate or energy clubs/groups as well as student venture initiatives
- Resourceful and self-directed; you don’t wait to be told where to look, but aren’t afraid to ask for help when you need it
- Genuine obsession with energy, climate tech, and industrial infrastructure — you read Canary Media, Heatmap, and Latitude Media, follow DOE funding announcements for fun, and of course frequently listen to Inevitable podcast!
- Strong builder instinct with software and data: comfortable navigating key databases (e.g., Pitchbook, Harmonic) with smart filtering, and excited to use AI tools to structure messy data and scale workflows rather than do everything by hand
- Excellent spoken and written communication — you can distill a complex deep-tech company into a clear, concise lunch-and-learn meeting, a memo, and you’re comfortable cold-emailing founders to get their attention
- Sound judgment: able to separate signal from noise and defend a point of view to a room of investors
- Experience building internal tools, scripts, or automations (even informally) to support a research or investment workflow
Geography
MCJ is a distributed team that primarily works remotely, but we have or are building hubs in geographies that are key to our sourcing engine, and this role needs to be in one of them. This includes: San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Boston, and Austin.
Interested in this job?
Let the hiring team at MCJ contact you! Click I’m interested and enter your Linkedin profile and preferred contact information.