Smart Bricks
Institutional Acquisitions Lead
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Institutional Acquisitions Lead
Build the Underwriting Standard for AI in Real Estate
Location: London
About Smart Bricks
Smart Bricks is building the intelligence layer for real estate. Every year, trillions of dollars are invested across residential, commercial and alternative real estate using fragmented systems, disconnected data and manual workflows. We're building an AI-native platform that enables investors, developers, lenders, governments and Fortune 500 companies to source opportunities, underwrite investments, perform due diligence and manage portfolios using AI.
Alongside our software platform, we're building an Applied AI Lab that works directly with some of the world's largest real estate organisations to redesign complex institutional workflows using AI. Every customer engagement generates institutional knowledge. Every deployment strengthens the platform. Every improvement compounds across every future customer.
We've raised over $5 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), and are backed by some of the world's leading technology ecosystems, including Techstars, Google, NVIDIA and Microsoft through their AI and startup programmes.
We're now building our founding team in London. Our London team is based at Balderton Capital, one of Europe's leading venture capital firms, putting us alongside some of Europe's most ambitious founders, investors and technology companies.
Why exceptional people join us
- 🚀 $5M+ raised, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
- 🤝 Backed by Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Techstars
- 🏢 Building our core team in London at Balderton Capital
- 🤖 Underwriting alongside AI agents, not building the same model for the hundredth time
- 🌍 Working on live deals with some of the world's largest real estate investors and lenders
- 🏗️ Opportunity to shape how an entire industry underwrites, three years into your career rather than twenty
Why this role?
This isn't a traditional acquisitions analyst role. You won't spend your nights formatting IC decks or rebuilding the same Excel template for every deal that comes through the door.
You'll be the investment professional in a team of engineers and researchers. You'll underwrite real transactions for our institutional customers, compare your work against what the platform produces, and work out where the system is right, where it's shallow and where it's wrong. Every gap you find becomes something we fix. Every deal you underwrite makes the platform better at the next one.
You'll spend time inside acquisitions teams at funds, asset managers and lenders, understand how they actually underwrite, and bring that back so Smart Bricks reflects how institutions genuinely work. The question you'll constantly ask is: Would an investment committee sign off on this? If not, you'll know exactly why, and you'll help fix it at the source.
What You'll Own
Underwrite Real Deals
- Underwrite live opportunities for our institutional customers across office, residential, industrial, retail, hospitality and alternatives:
- Build and review cash flow models for acquisitions, developments and credit investments
- Analyse returns, sensitivities and the impact of revenue, cost, financing and tax assumptions
- Analyse leases, rent rolls, operating budgets and financial statements
- Analyse partnership and capital structures
- Draft investment summaries, theses and IC-ready materials
- Your underwriting sets the bar the platform is measured against.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
Pressure-Test the Platform
- Compare the system's underwriting to your own on every deal:
- Challenge assumptions, comps, sensitivities and conclusions
- Identify where outputs fall short of an institutional standard
- Document the gaps clearly enough that engineers and researchers can act on them
- Verify fixes against subsequent deals
- You'll be one of the people who decides when an output is good enough to go in front of a customer.
Encode How Institutions Work
- Work with Product, Engineering and Applied AI to turn real acquisitions workflows into the platform:
- Screening and mandate fit
- Underwriting and modelling conventions
- Due diligence and external report review
- Investment committee preparation
- Business plan tracking post-acquisition
- You'll define what the system needs to know about a deal, a market and an institution to get the answer right.
Build Asset-Specific Depth
- Different assets require fundamentally different analysis. You'll help define the specialist work each one demands:
- Office: leases, tenants, ERV, WAULT, breaks, incentives, reletting costs
- Residential and living: rent rolls, occupancy, regulation, operating costs
- Industrial and logistics: rental growth, supply pipeline, tenant covenant
- Hospitality: ADR, occupancy, RevPAR, GOP, operators and brands
- Development: planning, construction costs, programme, GDV, residual land value
- Credit: LTV, DSCR, covenants, downside and recovery
Own Market Evidence
- Research, synthesise and analyse real estate markets by asset type and geography: transactions, rents, yields, supply, demand and macro conditions.
- You'll make sure the evidence the platform relies on is current, sourced and defensible.
Live With the Customer
- Sit inside acquisitions teams at funds, asset managers, pension funds, family offices and lenders. Understand their mandates, hurdle rates, investment criteria and approval processes. Map how their investment committees decide. Then bring it back and make sure the platform reflects it.
What Success Looks Like
Within your first 12 months, you'll have:
- Underwritten a meaningful volume of live deals across multiple asset classes and geographies for institutional customers
- Established a repeatable process for reviewing platform outputs and feeding corrections back into the system
- Materially improved the platform's underwriting accuracy against realised outcomes
- Built the specialist analysis frameworks for at least three asset classes
- Documented the underwriting conventions of several institutional customers so the platform can apply them automatically
- Become the person engineers and researchers turn to when they need to know how a deal actually works
- Become a trusted counterpart to the Founder, Product, Engineering and Applied AI on anything investment-related
Success won't be measured by the number of models built. It will be measured by whether institutions trust the platform's underwriting enough to act on it.
Who We're Looking For
We're looking for an analyst who is exceptional at the fundamentals and restless about how they're done.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
You've underwritten real transactions with real capital at stake. You've built models from scratch and defended them to people more senior than you. You've noticed how much of the work is repetitive, and wondered why nobody has fixed it.
You'll likely have:
- 3 to 6 years in real estate acquisitions, underwriting or investment analysis at an institutional investor, real estate private equity firm, pension fund, sovereign fund, lender or investment bank
- Underwritten direct asset, portfolio or corporate transactions across more than one asset class, in equity or debt
- Advanced financial modelling skills and the ability to build an institutional-grade model independently
- Experience preparing investment committee materials and supporting due diligence through to closing
- A strong grasp of real estate fundamentals, valuation and transaction structuring
- Exposure to more than one geography, ideally including the UK, Europe or the Gulf
- Genuine curiosity about AI and the appetite to work daily alongside engineers and researchers
- Strong writing skills and the ability to explain a deal clearly to someone who has never seen it
- A degree from a strong institution in finance, real estate, economics or a related field. CFA, MRICS or a master's are assets, not requirements. Knowledge of ARGUS is a plus
You're equally comfortable tearing apart a rent roll, sitting with an institutional client, explaining to an engineer why a model behaves the way it does, writing up a market and making a call on whether an output is good enough. Experience in AI or software isn't required. We care far more about rigorous, curious analysts who are excited about redefining how one of the world's largest asset classes gets underwritten.
Compensation & Benefits
We believe exceptional people should share in the value they create. You'll receive a highly competitive salary and a meaningful equity package, private healthcare, flexible working, an annual learning and conference budget, access to the latest AI models and developer tooling, and a seat in our London office at Balderton Capital, alongside one of Europe's leading VC ecosystems.
How We Work
We hold ourselves to exceptionally high standards. We think like owners, move quickly without compromising quality, solve problems proactively, communicate with clarity, sweat the details, stay relentlessly curious and bias towards action. We optimise for execution and learning, not bureaucracy and hierarchy, and we care more about outcomes than job titles.
Why Join
We move insanely fast, with real rigour and standards, to build the company that redefines how AI works for real assets. You'll work directly with the Founder and founding team, underwriting live deals for some of the world's largest institutions and shaping how the platform thinks about real estate. The work you do here will be applied to every deal the system evaluates, for every institution that uses it, for years to come. If you're the type to get out of bed to change how an industry makes its most consequential decisions, in this generation and the ones after, Smart Bricks is the place for you. We'd love to talk.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills
Location