Founder in Residence, AI Ventures (Core AI)

Location: Hybrid role based in Santa Clara, California, United States

Salary: $180,000–$200,000 annualized for Sprint 1; $200,000–$240,000 annualized for Sprint 2

Company

LG NOVA, the hirify.global North America Innovation Center, builds and spins out new technology ventures with LG resources and support.

What you will do

• Develop and sharpen a venture thesis in a domain with strong market insight.
• Conduct buyer discovery and identify economic buyers, budget owners, purchasing processes, and demand.
• Validate customer pain, workflows, willingness to pay, and market size.
• Design and test paid pilots, design partner programs, or early commercial offerings.
• Secure evidence such as paid pilots, commercially structured letters of intent, or design partner agreements.
• Build the commercialization plan and business model, then recommend whether LG should invest and build.

Requirements

• Founder, repeat founder, or founding executive experience.
• Deep expertise and credibility in a specific industry or problem space, with an active network of buyers and decision-makers.
• Experience building, commercializing, or scaling a business, product, or new business line, including prior fundraising.
• Experience with core AI or adjacent infrastructure, including model training or fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment, inference, optimization, or production-scale operations.
• Understanding of AI and data pipelines, compute and performance trade-offs, production reliability, and the economics of operating AI systems at scale.
• Full-time and exclusive contract engagement in a hybrid Santa Clara role; no active role in another startup is permitted during the program.

Nice to have

• Experience building reusable AI infrastructure, platforms, developer tooling, or AI-native products for enterprise customers.
• Expertise in AI management platforms, agentic coding, agent orchestration, workflow automation, AI safety, security, compliance, data infrastructure, or developer platforms.

Culture & Benefits

• Two-sprint program: 90 days of validation followed by approximately 180 days of commercialization and venture formation.
• Concept testing budget and up to $500,000 to advance a validated idea toward commercialization.
• Access to government partnerships, market research, market sizing, financial modeling, and engineering services.
• LG-backed funding pathway and equity in the venture if it progresses to a Seed round.
• Potential path to become Founder and CEO if the venture spins out.

Hiring process

• Submit a resume and a one-page founder summary covering a venture built or commercialized, known buyers and demand validation, and an example of using a network to accelerate an outcome.
• During Sprint 1, review progress weekly, with checkpoints around Days 30, 45, and 60 and a panel review on Day 90.
• Continuation into Sprint 2 depends on the panel decision and successful completion of the validation sprint.