Forward Deployed Investor

ABOUT US

Premji Invest is a $17B+ evergreen crossover fund investing across AI, Enterprise, Consumer, Health, and Deeptech sectors. The firm operates as one integrated team spanning early-stage, growth, and public markets, partnering with founders from inception to IPO and beyond. Premji Invest's capital supports the Azim Premji Foundation, one of the world's largest philanthropic endowments. The organization is driven by a clear mission: ensuring capital market returns translate into meaningful human outcomes for communities worldwide.

THE ROLE

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Investor. The core of the job is building: finding the places where AI can create real leverage, in our portfolio companies and inside our own firm, and owning the work end to end until it ships and gets used. You will be embedded with portfolio companies across stages, build the AI tools that run our investment process, and train as an investor alongside the team.

This is a new role. There is no playbook. You will be expected to find the highest-value problems yourself, make the case for them, and deliver.

The role is based in our Menlo Park office, with 3-4 days a week in person.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Embed with portfolio companies, from Series A startups to public companies, learn how they operate, and quickly identify where AI can move the business across product, engineering, go-to-market, or operations
• Build solutions hands-on with portfolio teams, such as prototyping agents, standing up eval pipelines, fixing LLM workflows, or setting up internal AI tooling, rather than delivering recommendations alone
• Advise founders and engineering leaders on AI strategy and architecture: model and vendor selection, inference cost, agentic workflows, and build vs. buy
• Own Premji's internal AI tools end to end, from scoping and design through deployment and adoption, across sourcing, company research, CRM, diligence prep, memo drafting, and portfolio monitoring
• Connect our data systems (CRM, email, PitchBook, internal documents) into workflows the investment team relies on every day
• Capture patterns and reusable tools across engagements so each one makes the next faster
• Participate in sourcing and diligence on live opportunities, leading technical evaluation and contributing to investment memos

QUALIFICATIONS

• 1-3 years of experience in engineering or product at a startup
• A track record of owning something end to end, whether a product, major feature, or internal tool, from idea through shipping and adoption
• Self-starter who finds the problem without being told, works well with ambiguity, and moves without close oversight
• Ability to drop into an unfamiliar company, earn the team's trust, and deliver something useful within weeks
• AI-native: you build with LLMs and agent frameworks every day and have clear views on prompting, evals, tool use, retrieval, and where current models fall short
• Full-stack capability to build and deploy internal tools on your own
• Credibility with engineers and founders
• Interest in how companies win and a desire to develop investment judgment

Preferred: founding or early-employee experience, a side project with real users, or a public body of work such as a GitHub, blog, or tools others use.