Associate, AI & Data Infrastructure

<h2><strong>The Role</strong></h2> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>You don't need an investing background. </strong>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.</p> <hr> <h2><strong>Key Responsibilities</strong></h2> <ul> <li><strong>Be in the mix.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Source with conviction.</strong> 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.</li> <li><strong>Develop investment theses.</strong> 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 convict