Unusual

Consumers are using AI models to help them buy things. First AI models were information aggregators: tools people used to search and summarize. Now they're trusted advisors: what people consult before making a decision. Increasingly, they're becoming trusted buyers: agents that shop, evaluate, and transact on behalf of humans. When AI makes the ultimate buying decision, then it becomes more important for brands to win over AI than for them to win over the human consumer. In that world, understanding how AI perceives a company's value proposition becomes one of the most consequential things that company can understand about itself. We apply the principles of AI interpretability research to study how models actually think about companies, and underneath the surface noise we find remarkably stable beliefs, formed from the proof points a company has put into the world (often inadvertently). Companies starting to take this seriously are realizing something uncomfortable: in an AI-evaluated market, marketing claims without substance to back them up don’t work anymore. Conversely, companies that deliver on their value proposition have unbounded opportunity to reach and acquire new buyers. AI agents are judging every brand's value promise, and are teaching humans how to do the same. About our team Unusual is the AI interpretability platform for marketing and GTM teams. We help companies shape how AI models actually think about their brand and value proposition. We're backed by Y Combinator and the first investors in SpaceX, Uber, Stripe, Clay, and Notion, and we already work with Big Five agencies and Fortune 100 brands. Demand is outpacing our capacity to serve it. Our cofounder, Will, is a second-time, venture-backed founder (Khosla and Greylock backed Remedy Health). Will started AI interpretability research in 2014 at MIT, where he applied black-box interpretability techniques to language modeling built on recurrent neural networks. He also built an early prototype of Starlink at SpaceX. Prior to MIT, at sixteen, Will earned international acclaim for having successfully retrofitted his family microwave into a Farnsworth nuclear fusion reactor. Our cofounder, Keller, was previously Chief of Staff and Head of Growth at 8VC-backed Gatsby. He has made 15,000 cold phone calls as part of the Biden presidential campaign in Pennsylvania; he coauthored, “America, Unite or Die” with statistician and inventor of overnight polling, Douglas Schoen; he studied Econometrics at Princeton, where he was the youngest Div. 1 water polo captain in program history. Our Head of GTM, Sarah, has scaled two startups from $0 in revenue to eight figures: she drove 10X growth at Circle Medical (YC W17), then built Ambience Healthcare's go-to-market from pre-revenue, which went on to raise $350M from Oak HC/FT, Kleiner Perkins, OpenAI, and a16z. She got her start at Google designing growth engines and strategy and operations at Deloitte. Why this role exists We've grown fast with a very small team force-multiplied by Claude Code and unlimited token budgets. Our constraint today is time. There are always more high-value things worth doing than the exec team can personally carry: a product surface that needs an owner for a week, a customer relationship that needs attention, a hiring loop that should be run well, a new market worth testing. This role exists to take any of those, get up to speed fast, and carry it to a successful outcome with little oversight, and to build the systems that make the next version of that work take a fraction of the time. You're the person the executive team relies on to create leverage on the most important initiatives at the business. Who You are You're a high-agency generalist who's at your best when you're handed something ambiguous and important and left to run with it. With little instruction, you take projects from ideation to over the finish line. You are diligent, obsessed with the details, and you can identify what tasks ar

The Future of Agentic Buying People are increasingly trusting AI to help them buy things. First AI agents were information aggregators, trusted to search and summarize. Now they're trusted to advise on key decision-making. Increasingly, they're becoming autonomous buyers: agents that shop, evaluate, and transact on behalf of humans. When AI is the audience, how it perceives your value proposition becomes one of the most consequential things a company can understand about itself. We apply the principles of AI interpretability research to study how models actually think about companies, and underneath the surface noise we find remarkably stable beliefs, formed from the proof points a company has put into the world (often inadvertently). Companies starting to take this seriously are realizing something uncomfortable: in an AI-evaluated market, marketing claims without substance to back them up don’t work anymore. Conversely, companies that deliver on their value proposition have unbounded opportunity to reach and acquire new buyers. AI agents are judging every brand's value promise, and are teaching humans how to do the same. About Unusual Unusual is the AI interpretability platform for marketing and GTM teams. We help companies shape how AI models actually think about their brand and value proposition. Why this role exists Every company has a unique path to get ready for the rapidly approaching future of agentic buying. When agentic buying arrives for their industry, a company’s ability to thrive will depend on their ability to (1) understand how AI agents evaluate them, (2) enable AI agents to interact with their business, and (3) make the right strategic bets that continually refine their value proposition as perceived by AI. We build the platform and we apply the methodology directly alongside companies and consultancies. Being at the forefront of the practice of AI brand management, we are committed to learning alongside our partners and sharing what we learn. This role exists to be the trusted voice on the ground with each client; the person who turns the platform and methodology into decisions that move the business. Who we're looking for You're a strategic problem-solver who wants to work on critical problems. You can hold your own across the table from a CMO, CRO, or CEO, and you can push on the assumptions behind their most consequential decisions. You're already using tools like Claude Code to do your work better, and you want a role where that orientation is the work itself. You want the leverage that comes from learning and teaching a practice that's category-defining, with a research team that's done the work to make this approach possible and a platform already producing insights no one else can. What you'd own You'd be the engagement lead for a portfolio of companies who want to shape how AI models perceive their brand and value proposition. That means: Ramping quickly on each client's business and operating model so they want you in the room when strategic GTM decisions are being made Translating our interpretability analyses, grounded in each client's business reality, into clear and actionable moves on content, positioning, and proof points Operating at the leadership level, bringing the clarity that helps client executives act Using Claude Code and our internal platform to generate analyses, prototype features, and contribute back to the systems your teammates rely on Capabilities we look for Stakeholder mapping. You can read a room, see the dynamics, and figure out how to deliver value in a way that lets every stakeholder win. First-principles communication. You can write a tight brief and walk a CEO through it without losing the room or oversimplifying. You can also write it for a senior IC who'll do the implementation work. AI-native orientation. Claude Code, MCPs, and prototyping with agents are already part of how you work. Curiosity, ownership, truth-seeking, comfort with constructive disagreement, se

The Future of Agentic Buying People are increasingly trusting AI to help them buy things. First AI agents were information aggregators, trusted to search and summarize. Now they're trusted to advise on key decision-making. Increasingly, they're becoming autonomous buyers: agents that shop, evaluate, and transact on behalf of humans. When AI is the audience, how it perceives your value proposition becomes one of the most consequential things a company can understand about itself. Companies starting to take this seriously are realizing something uncomfortable: in an AI-evaluated market, marketing claims without substance to back them up don’t work anymore. Conversely, companies that deliver on their value proposition have unbounded opportunity to reach and acquire new buyers. AI agents are judging every brand's value promise, and are teaching humans how to do the same. About Unusual We help companies shape how AI models actually think about their brand and products. We apply the principles of AI interpretability research to study how models actually think about companies, and underneath the surface noise we find remarkably stable beliefs, formed from the proof points a company has put into the world (often inadvertently). This is an immensely important and interesting technical challenge – our engineering team focuses on reverse engineering the sources, implicit biases, and reasoning patterns that guide model behavior, and builds products that use this understanding to help people regain control over how they are represented.  From a product perspective, we have a unique opportunity: we can accurately measure LLM’s opinions of a brand, which enables us to quantify a brand’s performance relative to their peers along any dimension. By putting numbers to these previous intangibles, we can add an element of science to the art of brand; perhaps the final piece of a decades-long effort to bring math to marketing.  If you want to define a product category, push the boundary on a new field of research – applied interpretability, and make a positive impact by helping people control their own narrative rather than large AI companies, we’d love to talk. About the role As a Founding Engineer, you’ll own problems end-to-end – from high level customer insight all the way to research and infrastructure. You will be expected to understand customer needs, work closely with the executive team, and ship fast. In addition, you’ll help shape a new engineering team at the dawn of a new kind of software development. Agentic coding is the next paradigm, and as AI tooling improves, we’ll need to work together to regularly reinvent the best patterns and practices for working alongside agents on a team. Who you are You are a high-agency builder who thrives on difficult technical problems and wants to own outcomes end-to-end, from customer insight to shipped feature. You are full-stack, comfortable working from customer-facing UI all the way down to infrastructure. You are eager to define new ways of operating an engineering team built around agentic coding tools. You are an individual contributor by choice and want to stay close to the code. You have a strong sense for product and design that lets you build things people love. You have prior startup experience or self-driven personal projects that demonstrate initiative. You are curious about how LLMs work and excited to build systems that probe and influence them. Bonus: You have scientific research experience. Bonus: You're comfortable talking to customers directly. Technical requirements 1+ years of experience on engineering teams (3+ preferred) Comfortable with React, Python, Terraform, and AWS Experience building agentic systems Who we are We're backed by Y Combinator and the first investors in SpaceX, Uber, Stripe, Clay, and Notion. And our team has solved some of the most challenging problems in technology and go-to-market—ranging from building the first Starlink prototype at SpaceX to scaling

Job Description Founding GTM Lead A GTM athlete who closes deals, owns pipeline, sources leads, and builds the AI systems that multiply all of it. Very high agency, very fast learner. What we do More and more buying starts with AI. Buyers ask AI assistants what to buy, and increasingly those assistants research, compare, and even purchase on a person's behalf. That makes the way AI describes a company to a buyer almost as important as the company's own website. Most brands have no idea what AI says about them, and no way to change it. We give them both: we measure what AI models actually believe about a brand, and we help reshape those beliefs through the proof points the company puts into the world. In other words, Unusual helps brands position themselves to appeal to their growing AI audience. Why this role exists now We've grown fast with essentially one person running marketing and sales part-time. That's already proven that companies, from Fortune 100 to "Big Five" marketing agencies, want this and will pay real money for it. The outbound we run today gets reply rates in the double digits (a recent campaign ran around 13%) because every company is thinking and worrying about this, and many have carte blanche buying mandates. Now we need someone to take the demand we've created and the motion that already works, land and expand it, systematize it so it scales, and then experiment in new directions to find the next channels and segments. What you'll own The whole go-to-market motion, with you at the center of the part that can't be automated. You'll: Close. Run discovery and sales calls with operators and executives, and carry deals to signature. This is the heart of the role and the one thing we'll never hand to a machine. Manage pipeline. Own your pipeline end to end and keep every deal moving. Source. Generate leads across channels now, then make yourself the last person who ever has to do it by hand. Build the machine. Work directly with the founders to design the AI systems, workflows, and automations (Claude Code or another agent as your force multiplier) that source, qualify, and nurture, so one person produces what used to take a team. The job is as much building as selling. You do the work by hand where you need to, and you're always building the system that makes it unnecessary next time. Who you are You can sell. You've run real sales conversations and closed, ideally in an unstructured, early-stage setting where the playbook didn't exist yet. You're extremely high agency. You create structure where none exists, and you don't need to be managed closely to perform. You learn fast. You pick up new tools and domains quickly, and you know the difference between what you know and what you don't. You're AI-native or sprinting there. You already use Claude Code, or you're hungry to, and you want to build the systems that multiply you. Bonus points for being an early or founding sales hire (or selling your own product as a founder), automated outbound flows you've built with AI tools, selling complex technology to non-technical buyers, an engineering background, or a competitive sport. Compensation $100–300k on-target (base plus uncapped commission), depending on experience and ramp, with potential for founding equity. The same way AI tools make a great engineer 10x or 30x more productive, they will do the same for a great go-to-market athlete. The more you multiply yourself, the more you make, without limits. Who we are We're backed by Y Combinator and the first investors in SpaceX, Uber, Stripe, Clay, and Notion. Our values: Character comes first. We only work with people we deeply trust and respect. It makes the work more fun, more freeing, and more effective. Stay in touch with customer pain. Everyone at Unusual works in the customer service department. Whatever it takes. When we know what we must do, we don't take shortcuts or shy away from huge, ugly challenges. We work hard, and now and then we sprint. Wil