Operator-In-Residence (OIR): Agents
About the Company
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.
The firm’s Incubation arm, Primary Labs, launched in 2019 to support the ideation, research and launch of new startups. Primary’s first three incubated companies will return its first fund many times over, and Primary is now primed for substantial growth in its Incubation efforts.
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.
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.
This is not a traditional engineering role. As an OIR, you will work directly with the AI Infrastructure Investment Pod 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 builders first, but ultimately company creators. High-performing OIRs have the opportunity to step into a founding role within a company they help incubate.
What You’ll Do
Design and build agent-based systems using emerging agent frameworks as they are released
Push the limits of local AI infrastructure to identify technical and commercial inflection points
Ability to pressure test hardware and its performance capabilities for various agents
Understand and develop a software stack for local, personalized agent deployments
Build and execute evals to measure performance for different types of agents and architectures
Translate technical experimentation into defensible product and company concepts
Partner with investors to pressure-test ideas from both technical and market perspectives
Rapidly prototype, iterate, and deploy systems in real-world environments
Operate with high autonomy and ownership across ideation, validation, and early product build
About You
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