Forward Deployed Engineer, Data
About The Position
At Tenex, Strategists scope and prioritize the bets. Forward Deployed Engineers make them real. You are the engineer who walks into a client codebase and ships the AI workflow that changes how thousands of people do their job. The plan becomes the running system because you built it. You work close to the problem and close to the client. Architecture decisions are yours. The code is yours. The credit and the consequences are yours. You partner with Strategists to choose the right bets, with client engineering teams to ship inside their stack, and with the latest agentic coding tools to move at speeds that weren't possible a year ago. The bar for the work is that it ships and it lands. Demos don't count. Prototypes that never make it to production don't count. What counts is the workflow running on Monday morning when nobody from Tenex is in the room, the business outcome it drives, and the story the client tells about what changed. Compensation reflects this. Your base is guaranteed, your variable pay is uncapped, and your throughput is measured directly. Engineers in good standing make significantly more than base. You'll work alongside AI Strategists and our partner teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel, and beyond. Plan on traveling to client sites about once a month.
Requirements
- 3 to 8 years building and shipping production software end-to-end, with a track record of turning complex problems into clean, scalable systems
- AI as a core part of how you work. You use agentic coding tools to raise the quality and the throughput of everything you ship
- Intellectual curiosity and range. You track how the AI landscape evolves (new models, new tools, new techniques) and you bring what you learn back to the team
- Operational discipline. You manage parallel workstreams across multiple clients without losing clarity or quality. You prioritize well, context-switch cleanly, and sustain output over time
- Collaborative rigor. You hold yourself and others to a high standard, contribute actively to team knowledge, and make the people around you more effective
Nice To Haves
- Public artifacts of your work: open source contributions, a side project people use, a blog post or talk on applied AI engineering that landed
- Experience shipping a production agentic system end-to-end (not a POC)
Responsibilities
- Own features end-to-end. Architecture, implementation, deploy, the relationship with the client engineer reviewing your PR. Nothing gets handed off
- Use every agentic coding tool that gives you leverage. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever ships next week. Your throughput is measured and your pay scales with it
- Ramp into unfamiliar codebases. Sometimes a Fortune 500 monolith in a language you haven't touched in years. Sometimes a stack that was built last quarter. You get productive without a lot of hand-holding
- Design agent systems that are reliable, auditable, and keep humans in the loop where they belong. The work has to run when nobody from Tenex is in the room
- Make the team better. The workflow refinements you discover on one engagement get adopted across every other engagement. Your wins compound across the firm
Benefits
- Comprehensive medical (PPO and HSA options), dental, and vision
- HSA, Healthcare FSA, and Commuter Benefits
- 100% employer-paid life insurance + AD&D
- 100% employer-paid long-term disability insurance
- Responsible PTO. Take what you need.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
