Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Tenex•New York, NY

11d•Onsite

About The Position

The Senior Forward Deployed Engineer is the core role at Tenex, responsible for turning frontier intelligence into real results for businesses. This is not a support or services role, but rather the primary position for driving client success. Engineers in this role embed within client organizations to identify opportunities for AI to create tangible value, design and build custom production AI systems, and remain accountable for their performance and improvement in live environments. The role involves significant customer interaction, technical decision-making, and a high degree of ownership, akin to a founder within an engagement.

Requirements

Shipped production software that real users depended on and for which you remained accountable after launch.
Built something real with LLMs and can explain what made it reliable, not just impressive.
Ability to walk into an unfamiliar domain and be genuinely useful within days.
Ability to explain decisions clearly to a CEO and to another engineer.
Experience working with coding agents and having informed opinions about their utility.
Strong engineering skills and a demonstrated ability to move into AI.
High 'slope' - ability to improve faster than peers.

Responsibilities

Embed inside a real business to discover where AI can create real value.
Turn ambiguity into a product direction and a technical plan, and defend these decisions.
Ship the complete system, making build-versus-buy and architecture calls independently.
Measure production outcomes and continuously improve the system after deployment.
Own a workstream outright, deciding what gets built and in what order.
Serve as the technical voice for the client on their workstream.
Identify and communicate when scope needs to be adjusted and re-cut.
Structure work for coding agents, engineer durable context, evaluate outputs, and determine the balance between agent autonomy and human judgment.
Contribute to the development of reusable agent systems, evaluations, and tools that improve future engagements.
Work at the boundary between the capabilities of the newest AI models and what can be reliably deployed in production.