AI Engineer in Residence, Summer 2026

Spend your summer automating a venture capital fund from the inside

Most internships have you shadowing meetings and formatting slide decks. This one hands you a real problem: take a top-performing pre-seed fund and rebuild how it works with AI.

You'll join our investment team for 2-3 months this summer and ship agents, automations and internal tools that we actually use, every day, to find and back the best founders in Europe. You'll have direct access to partners, real data, real workflows, and the autonomy to decide what to build next.

About Playfair

We're a VC fund focused exclusively on pre-seed investing: bringing discipline, diligence, dedication and depth of thought to an intentionally low volume of investments. Our pre-seed to Series A graduation rate is 78%, roughly 4x the industry average, and our fund performance sits in the top quartile against US and European benchmarks.

Since 2013, our founders have raised over $3bn of follow-on capital from the world's best funds, including Nory ($37m Series B, Kinnevik), Orca AI ($72.5m Series B, BPC), Protex AI ($36m Series B, Hedosophia) and StackOne ($20m Series A, GV). In Founders Choice anonymous polling, we were voted the 3rd best VC fund in Europe.

Our team is a mix of angel investors, operators, founders, engineers, lawyers, bankers, professional poker players and biochemists who share a deep passion for startups. We're now in the fourth year of investing from our $70m third fund.

What you'll do

• Build and ship the first versions of tools that help us source deals, qualify them faster, and support our portfolio companies at scale.
• Design agentic workflows (n8n, Claude, LLM APIs, whatever gets the job done) that remove the repetitive work from venture investing.
• Sit inside the investment team, see how a fund actually operates, and decide for yourself where AI can move the needle most.
• Demo what you've built to the whole team, get feedback fast, and iterate.
• Finish the summer with a portfolio of deployed, production tools used by professional investors, not a toy project.

Requirements

• A student or recent graduate who is AI-native: you're obsessed with the latest models, agents and tools, and you've been building with them for fun.
• You ship. You can point us to projects, automations or products you've built, ideally with users beyond yourself. A GitHub, a demo video or a live link beats a CV.
• You think like a founder: high ownership, high energy, low ego. You'd rather build a scrappy v1 this week than a perfect spec next month.
• You're curious about venture. You don't need VC experience, but you should be excited to learn how funds find, pick and support startups.
• You're available for 2-3 months over summer 2026, full-time preferred and minimum 3 days a week, and can work from our Farringdon office in London regularly.
• You have the right to work in the UK. Current students and recent graduates are both welcome to apply.

Benefits

• A competitive salary, in line with market standards for the programme.
• Real ownership: your tools go into production and your name goes on them.
• Direct access to the investment team and the chance to learn the venture business from the inside, including sitting in on pitches and investment discussions.
• £50 per month wellness credits through Heka, plus team socials and a front-row seat to the European startup ecosystem.
• A strong reference and a network of founders and investors, whatever you do next.
• A genuine path forward: we're looking to shape a full-time engineering role that will be core to our fourth fund, launching in 2027. Top performers from this programme will be considered as part of that role.

How to apply

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis and we'll move quickly. The application takes minutes, not hours. We'll ask you for:

1. Your ambition: What would you want to have built by the end of the summer? (150 words max)
2. Your proof: Show us the coolest thing you've built. A link is all we need: GitHub, demo video, live product, n8n workflow, X thread, anything. It doesn't need to be polished and it doesn't need to be venture-related, we just want to see that you build.
3. Social profiles: Ideally your LinkedIn, plus anything else you'd like to share (GitHub, personal site, X).

No CV needed, no cover letters. Show us what you've shipped.