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Hey there,
Welcome to where I write about my journey from a stable Big Tech Software Engineering job to the wild and volatile world of Venture Capital.
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TL;DR — The job is half Iron-Man-in-residence, half tech therapist. From dawn Slack-pocalypses to midnight code necromancy, a Lead Engineer embedded inside a venture firm floats between three planets: (1) rapid-fire technical diligence (“Does this AI startup’s architecture actually… work?”), (2) portfolio triage and coaching (“Help, prod is on fire and we haven’t hired a DevOps human yet!”), and (3) internal platform building so the firm itself can scale (“Yes, even VCs need decent CI/CD”). It’s a mash-up of CTO-for-rent, McKinsey white-boarder, and community hype-man—powered by cold brew and an inbox that never hits 0.
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So … what is a Lead Engineer in VC, anyway?
Venture firms have quietly upgraded “platform teams” beyond recruiting and marketing; they now include technical operators whose KPIs are operational efficiency and portfolio value creation. Hunt Club’s survey of ~150 funds shows 70% have at least one full-time product or engineering lead embedded on platform. Think of it as the Terry Crews of tech: we show up, lift the heavy infra, flex some code, then hand the barbell to founders.
Engineers break into this seat because we offer something investors don’t—source-level X-ray vision. Kevin Zhang calls it the “pattern-matching superpower” that lets technical folks spot red flags and 10× opportunities before term sheets fly .
The Technical Side: Platform Development
My core responsibility revolves around building what we call "Augmented VC" - a system where software and humans work in perfect harmony. Our platform collects, processes, and contextualizes vast amounts of data to enhance the firms ability to find the best founders, vet their ideas, win the opportunity to invest in them, and support founders.
Sunrise-to-Zoom-o’Clock: A Typical Day
Time | What Really Happens |
|---|---|
7 a.m. | Inbox triage main lining caffeine. Founder #1 needs a pre-Series A architecture memo; Founder #2 discovered GDPR—yesterday. Partner #1 wants dossiers on everyone they’re meeting today. |
8 a.m. | Dive into a data-room repo, skimming for “ball-of-mud” smells and licensing hazards. Technical due-diligence checklists—think code quality, scalability, security—save the firm from seven-figure regrets. Review a plethora of PRs, maybe write your own code. |
10 a.m. | All-hands: translate git-greps into investor-speak (“Their Kafka cluster cries at 5 k msg/s—needs sharding before Series B”). Talk about new AI initiative that will allow us to have 1000x more meetings a day. Drink the Kool-aid. |
11 a.m. | Slack support in the founders’ community channel. “Why does my AWS bill look like Elon’s sandwich budget?” Spoiler: untagged GPU instances. |
Noon | Walk-and-think. Scan HN’s feed on startup IT pain points (observability, automation, managed security) to stay up to date. Maybe eat. |
1 p.m. | Office hours. Portfolio company Alpha: hiring its first engineers—harder than most founders expect. Beta: debating monolith vs. microservices after reading one Medium post too many. |
3 p.m. | Internal time: Work on founder identification platform that uses key signals like max deadlift weight, obscure hobbies, and burning man attendance. Re-up on caffeine. |
5 p.m. | Recruiting huddle: the market’s tilting toward senior talent as AI eats junior tasks. Cue curated intros to fractional VPs of Eng. |
6 p.m. | Internal time: build a Slack bot that scrapes GitHub issues across the portfolio and pings me when “segfault” + “production” land in the same sentence. |
9 p.m. | DevOps doom-scroll: Reddit thread on infra pain points (Terraform entropy, YAML yaks) fuels tomorrow’s knowledge-base drop. |
Midnight | Close laptop, open Kindle. Fail. Re-open laptop: prod-on-fire at Gamma. Hero-mode ON. |
Why This Weird Gig Matters
Every portfolio crisis a Lead Engineer defuses lifts portfolio MOIC more than another coffee-chat on “product-market fit.” Affinity’s data shows firms with strong platform/technical arms deliver 1.5× higher follow-on rates. We’re leverage incarnate: one operator, dozens of startups, compounding returns.
Plus, let’s be real: hacking together a load-balancer at 2 a.m. so founders can sleep? That’s the stuff term-sheet dreams (and future unicorn head-counts) are made of.
So next time you imagine life in a VC as endless cappuccinos and cap tables, remember there’s a hoodie-clad human in the corner SSH-ing into destiny—armed with kube-configs, bad puns, and just enough caffeine to keep the startup galaxy spinning.
Until next time!
Signing off and signing zero checks,
SWEdonym
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