About Primary
Primary is a seed-stage venture capital firm dedicated to delivering exceptional support to the founders of transformational businesses. By pairing meaningful investment resources with the largest portfolio impact team of any seed investor, our portfolio companies have reached an industry-best seed-to-A graduation rate.
Primary Labs is the firm’s incubation engine, focused on turning ideas into category-defining companies. With 20+ startups launched—including Ollie, Tabs, and LightTable—we partner closely with top operators to identify, validate, and build billion-dollar opportunities from day one.
About the Role
Primary Labs is looking for an Operator-in-Residence (OIR) to explore the frontier of local AI and agent frameworks and turn technical breakthroughs into company opportunities. This role is open to candidates based in New York or San Francisco.
This is not a traditional role. As an OIR, you will work directly with the AI Infrastructure Investment team to identify, validate, and shape new company ideas. You’ll move from exploration to conviction quickly, helping determine which technical breakthroughs can underpin venture-scale businesses.
OIRs at Primary Labs are company creators and have the opportunity to step into a founding role within a company they help incubate.
You'll report to Partner Brian Schechter, who has backed and sits on the board of companies like Etched and Tabs, and is actively incubating at the intersection of agents, edge, and AI. We've hit an inflection point: agents are easily accessible and more people want their own agents – but the experience remains elusive. We're going to break down those barriers with a company designed to make agents more accessible, exploring topics that range from compute to privacy, commerce to social.
You will operate at the edge of emerging agent infrastructure—testing new frameworks as they launch, stress-testing capabilities, and building production-grade agents for real use cases. The systems you build will not live as experiments—they will serve as the technical foundation for new ventures incubated within Primary Labs.
What You’ll Do
Continuously scan the frontier of AI research, infrastructure, and markets through deep self-study (research papers, industry publications, technical blogs, etc.) and active networking across startups, academia, and industry.
Identify new technologies and market opportunities that can be exploited to build new startups, with a particular focus on AI agent infrastructure spanning hardware (local/edge computing, new agentic devices, etc.), software (skill management/orchestration, agent monetization frameworks, etc.), and algorithms (continual learning, context compaction, etc.).
Develop and maintain a pipeline of hypotheses, pressure-testing them through independent research, conversations with domain experts, and internal debate with the Primary team.
Assemble and present supporting material (documents, slide decks, memos) to industry connections and firm teammates to refine ideas; defend views with evidence while maintaining a willingness to abandon ideas that do not survive scrutiny.
Build working prototypes rapidly to prove out initial concepts, seek early customer feedback, and iterate in tight loops.
Develop initial business plans for the most promising opportunities, including technology architecture, product roadmap, and go-to-market strategy.
Lead early hiring efforts to assemble the founding team.
About You
Experience: 4+ years in a technical product or adjacent role
Agent Native: You're already building with agents in your spare time and intuitively think in workflows, tools, and autonomous systems. You’ve shipped agents into production, have OpenClaw up and running, are familiar with local AI tools like Ollama or LM Studio, and a high level understanding of what’s capable of being deployed on your phone/Mac/Mac Mini.
Ecosystem-Embedded: You attend technical events, have boots on the ground, and follow the frontier closely
Self-Starter: You're hungry for autonomy and want real responsibility over what you ship and how it evolves
Entrepreneurial: You code constantly – side projects, experiments, and late-night "what if this works?” prototypes
Status-Aware Technologist: You're excited by the idea that agent capability - and who can wield it best - is becoming the next great competitive frontier