Associate, AI & Data Infrastructure

About this role

Bessemer Venture Partners is a global venture firm that partners with audacious founders building enduring and transformative businesses. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies across AI, health, consumer, enterprise, and frontier tech, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio includes Anthropic, Perplexity, Abridge, Canva, Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, Discord, Fal AI, Stubhub, and Toast and has $20 billion of assets under management.

The Role

We're hiring an Associate to join our investing team, focusing on early-stage opportunities across data infrastructure, AI infrastructure, and developer tools. You will work directly with Lauri Moore and collaborate with the broader Bessemer investment team to find and back the technical founders building the foundational layers of the next era of software.

Seed investing is a ground game. The most compelling opportunities at the earliest stages don't come from inbound decks — they come from being deeply embedded in the communities where builders and researchers spend their time. We're looking for someone who is energized by that work: showing up to meetups and happy hours, staying close to technical friends across the ecosystem, and building the kind of authentic relationships that mean founders call you first.

This is a role for someone who thinks independently, acts with urgency, and brings a point of view. Seed requires an optimist — you need to see what a company could become, not just what it is today. But conviction without rigor is just enthusiasm. You also need to dig deep, ask hard questions, and build a thesis before we commit capital.

You don't need an investing background. We'll teach you that. What you do need is a strong technical foundation, curiosity, and the kind of social instincts that make people want to spend time with you.

Key Responsibilities

• Be in the mix. You genuinely care about what people are building in data and AI infrastructure, and you stay close to the communities where that work happens — meetups, Discord servers, university lab demos, the dinner after the meetup. You build real relationships with engineers, researchers, and founders because you find their work fascinating. When they're ready to start something, you're already someone they want to talk to about it.

• Source with conviction. You proactively find the companies and founders we should be paying attention to — through your network, your research, and your own technical intuition. The best sourcing doesn't come from scanning pitch databases; it comes from pattern-matching across conversations, following a technical thread to its logical conclusion, and having the confidence to bring something to the team that nobody else is seeing yet.

• Develop investment theses. You go deep on emerging technical domains — new compute paradigms, the evolution of the data stack, AI-native developer workflows, inference infrastructure, and beyond. You create and refine Roadmaps that guide where we focus and how we allocate time. Your research sharpens the team's conviction and helps us see around corners.

• Lead diligence. You drive end-to-end due diligence on prospective investments: technical architecture reviews, customer and user interviews, competitive mapping, financial analysis, and reference calls. You synthesize your findings into clear investment recommendations and are expected to form and defend your own view.

• Support the portfolio. You help portfolio companies with what matters most in the early days: hiring key engineers, making strategic introductions, thinking through technical architecture decisions, and preparing for follow-on fundraises. You attend board meetings and are a resource founders want to call.

• Be a great teammate. You collaborate across teams — sharing context from your infrastructure work that helps an investor focused on a vertical see a new opportunity, jumping in to help a colleague with a key introduction, or connecting dots between portfolio companies. You are generous with your time and ideas, and you make the people around you better.

What You’ll Bring

• A technical backbone. Whether through a CS degree, a PhD in ML, years as a software engineer, time as a data scientist, or experience as a technical founder — you bring real fluency in how software systems are built. You can evaluate a technical architecture, understand trade-offs in system design, and hold your own in conversation with the best engineers in the world. This is a must.

• Natural social instincts. You don't network transactionally — you build real friendships across the ecosystem. You're the kind of person who goes to the happy hour, who texts a founder to check in on launch day, who remembers what someone's working on and connects them with the right person. Community building isn't a task for you — it's how you operate. This is also a must.

• Independent thinking. You form your own opinions, even when they're contrarian. You don't wait for permission to pursue an idea. When you see something interesting, you run it down. You're comfortable being wrong and you learn fast.

• Optimism with depth. You get excited by what's possible at the frontier of technology. But you pair that excitement with intellectual honesty — you dig into the details, pressure-test assumptions, and aren't afraid to surface uncomfortable truths during a diligence process. You want to be right, not just first.

• AI fluency. You are constantly using, experimenting with, and forming opinions on the latest AI products, models, and tools. You follow the research, you know the builders, and you have a point of view on where things are headed.

• Experience: 2–5+ years of professional experience in a technical role — as a software engineer, ML/AI researcher, data scientist, technical product manager, or founder. Zero investing experience is completely fine — some of

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