Ventures Associate - Enterprise & AI

Plug and Play Tech Center•West Windsor Township, NJ

About The Position

Plug and Play is seeking a technical Associate for its Enterprise & AI Ventures team. This role involves evaluating complex AI/enterprise software products, conducting technical and market diligence on early-stage companies, and understanding enterprise partner needs. The ideal candidate will have an engineering mindset and be interested in the intersection of AI systems, enterprise workflows, and venture investing. The role offers an opportunity to gain comprehensive venture capital experience, build relationships with founders and executives, and gain exposure to deals from seed to high growth.

Requirements

Strong technical foundation: CS/engineering background or equivalent experience shipping software.
Comfort evaluating modern AI systems and data stacks (e.g., LLM apps, RAG, fine-tuning, evals, vector DBs, warehouses/ETL, observability).
Ability to ask informed architecture/security questions and validate product claims.
Demonstrated analytical skills: can size markets and synthesize complex information.
Excellent written and verbal communication—able to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences.
Genuine curiosity about startups, venture capital, and emerging technologies.

Nice To Haves

Experience at a startup or a tech firm in product engineering, solutions engineering, ML engineering, security engineering, or technical PM.
Experience with technical content creation (blog posts, documentation, technical writing) or contributions to open source or side projects that show builder mentality.

Responsibilities

Build and refine investment theses across Enterprise AI and adjacent infrastructure (data, security, devtools, agentic systems).
Source and evaluate early-stage companies through a mix of inbound, outbound, and ecosystem channels.
Conduct technical diligence: architecture reviews, data infrastructure evaluation, and scalability analysis.
Track emerging technologies, competitive landscapes, and venture activity across focus areas.
Conduct structured interviews with corporate partners to understand technology gaps and innovation priorities.
Translate enterprise needs into actionable sourcing + diligence criteria.
Facilitate introductions between startups/scaleups and corporate partners.
Support executive briefings, demo days, and enterprise matchmaking.
Conduct structured product + architecture reviews (data flow, model approach, deployment model, integration pattern, scalability).
Assess feasibility and differentiation: “is this real?”, “what breaks at scale?”, “what’s defensible?”
Engage in technical conversations with founders to assess team capabilities and product sophistication.
Maintain market maps, startup databases, and competitive intelligence in focus areas.
Produce research reports, investment memos, and market analyses for internal and external audiences.
Contribute to thought leadership through blog posts, whitepapers, or speaking engagements.