Tenex builds production AI systems for businesses, including Fortune 500 companies. Founded in New York City in 2025, we’re roughly 50 people today and plan to grow to 150 by year-end. One in three of our engineers has founded a company.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you’re a software engineer who works directly with customers. You’ll design, write, test, and deploy production software while working with client teams to understand their requirements and make technical decisions.
You’ll work alongside AI Strategists, who combine consulting and product management to guide business priorities, define requirements, and lead adoption. You’ll own technical delivery for your workstream, from architecture through production performance.
Work with customers to understand their workflows, existing systems, and technical requirements.
Partner with an AI Strategist to define scope, priorities, and acceptance criteria.
Design system architecture and make build-versus-buy decisions.
Write and review production code, build integrations, and implement AI agents and workflows.
Build evaluations, tests, monitoring, and controls so the system can operate reliably.
Explain technical options and tradeoffs directly to customers.
Deploy, troubleshoot, and improve the software after launch.
You’ll be the main technical contact for your workstream. We expect you to make recommendations, explain your reasoning, and raise issues when requirements or deadlines need to change.
Building useful AI systems means working through fragmented data, existing infrastructure, and model behavior that can be difficult to predict. You’ll test what works, understand failure cases, and build software that people can depend on.
Recent work includes:
An operating system for a private equity firm with $115 billion under management.
AI verification of in-store sampling stations for a national retailer with 70,000 field staff.
Camera systems across thousands of retail stores to detect theft, manage queues, and track inventory.
Our clients span finance, software, media, industrials, energy, logistics, professional sports, healthcare, consumer packaged goods, real estate, and market research. Each engagement brings different technical constraints and business requirements.
You’ll also work on problems in agent orchestration, evaluation, memory, and long-running execution, where established engineering patterns are still developing.
We’re building an internal development system that uses coding agents across planning, architecture, implementation, testing, review, and delivery. It’s early, and every engineer at Tenex uses it.
You’ll help improve how we structure tasks for agents, provide context, evaluate generated code, and decide where conventional software or human review is needed. Tools, evaluations, and agent systems developed on your engagements will also support other teams.
You’ve built and shipped production software that users depended on, and supported it after launch.
You can make sound decisions about architecture, testing, reliability, and maintainability.
You’ve built with LLMs and can explain how you evaluated and improved their performance.
You use coding agents and understand how to review and validate their output.
You’re comfortable working directly with customers, asking questions, and explaining technical decisions.
You can learn an unfamiliar business and turn its requirements into working software.
You take responsibility for delivery and communicate early when something needs to change.
We care about the quality of your work, your judgment, and how quickly you learn. Years of experience are one part of that.
We work together in Manhattan five days a week. The pace is fast, and priorities can change as we learn more about a client’s needs. You’ll spend time both building software and working with the people who use it.
People share discoveries, review each other’s work, and help when a teammate gets stuck. We expect you to ask for help, explain disagreements, and respond thoughtfully to feedback.
As we take on new engagements and build products and teams, engineers who deliver can take on broader technical leadership and client responsibilities.
Compensation includes base salary, a quarterly bonus, and equity.
The quarterly bonus rewards delivery, quality, business outcomes, and leadership. Bonuses are not capped at target.
Everyone at Tenex holds equity in the company, including its interests in products and joint ventures developed through client work. We explain the compensation structure and your specific numbers with your offer.
Skills Required
- Shipped production software that real users depended on
- Built something real with LLMs and can explain successes and failures
- Experience designing and shipping end-to-end production AI/agent systems (architecture, build, monitoring, and iteration)
- Able to quickly become productive in unfamiliar domains (learn business context within days)
- Communicate technical decisions clearly to both executives and engineers
- Use AI in daily work and have informed opinions about best practices
- Willingness to work in Manhattan five days a week (on-site)
- Approximately 1-2 years of engineering experience or equivalent demonstrated work
What We Do
This AI thing, it’s real. As real as mobile, the internet, and each of the major paradigm shifts in technology that came before it. In fact, we think it’s more real. More powerful. More disruptive to how we work & how businesses operate. This leaves you with a choice. Disrupt yourself. Or be disrupted by others. Because as the cost of intelligence approaches zero, businesses will need to transition from AI-absent to AI-native if they want to stay relevant and succeed.
