Software Engineer - Agents

Tensec•Palo Alto, CA

4d•$182,000 - $230,000•Hybrid

About The Position

About Tensec Founded in 2023, Tensec is a global fintech that enables small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to enter global trade and thrive by giving them access to global transaction banking solutions that are user-friendly, efficient, and secure. Tensec founders have driven startups from foundation to exit, built decacorns, and led global teams at companies such as PayPal, Credit Karma, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. We’re putting together a world-class team to disrupt the $50 trillion cross-border b2b financial services industry by providing SMBs the financial strength to participate and win in the global economy. We believe that successful companies and teams are directly correlated to a company's cultural DNA. At Tensec, we make a deliberate effort to create values and foster a culture able to unleash both human and organizational potential. We strongly believe that the best business results derive from teams that have a strong identification with a mission, push themselves to the edge, and love what they do. Tensec is a diverse and inclusive company committed to growing a diverse and inclusive team. We invite people of all backgrounds and identities to apply. Additionally, we encourage everyone to share which pronouns you wish for us to use when addressing you (i.e., she/her, he/him, they/them). How we work We move fast, debrief quickly, and expect you to own your output. This is a dynamic company, we value speed and decisiveness over process. You'll have the context you need to make good decisions, and the autonomy to make them. About the role You'll own two things simultaneously: the shared agentic infrastructure that makes intelligent workflows possible at Tensec, and the agents and product features that run on top of it. One day you're designing the context management system that every agent depends on. The next you're shipping an agent that automates a workflow for our operations or treasury team — or a feature that a customer interacts with directly. This isn't a role with a narrow scope. You'll be expected to understand the business problems behind the work, not just execute on specs. You'll own problems end to end and see them through to production. What you'll learn How to build production-grade AI systems in a compliance-sensitive financial environment Cross-border payments and FX infrastructure at scale across Brazil, Mexico, the US, and beyond What it looks like to build a company from the ground up, with real ownership and real stakes

Requirements

5+ years of backend software engineering with a track record of shipping production systems end to end
Hands-on experience building and shipping agentic systems or large language model-powered workflows in production
Strong product sense: you understand business needs, think from the end user's perspective, and care about whether what you ship actually creates value
Strong fundamentals across APIs, distributed systems, databases, and cloud-native architecture
Comfortable moving between infrastructure thinking and hands-on product iteration, you don't stay in one lane
Comfortable owning ambiguous problems,you can scope, build, ship, and iterate without a lot of hand-holding
Experience in an early-stage startup or demonstrated ability to work at that pace
Node.js or Python backend experience; comfort with AWS and modern CI/CD tooling
Experience or genuine interest in regulated industries where correctness and compliance are non-negotiable

Nice To Haves

Experience with multi-model or multi-provider artificial intelligence systems
Familiarity with orchestration frameworks, tool use, Model Context Protocol surfaces, or evaluation pipelines
Background in cross-border payments, Anti-Money Laundering, or transaction monitoring

Responsibilities

Design and build the core agentic infrastructure at Tensec: orchestration, tool execution, context and session management, policy controls, and observability
Build, ship, and operate agents that automate real financial workflows across operations, compliance, and treasury, from transaction document review to Know Your Business and sanctions screening
Ship product features end to end, from backend services and APIs to experiences built on top of agentic capabilities, serving both internal and external customers
Drive build versus buy decisions on third-party components, integrate where it accelerates us, own what matters for reliability and trust
Build evaluation and monitoring systems to ensure agents are accurate, reliable, and safe in a regulated financial environment
Implement routing logic to optimize large language model usage across providers
Contribute to engineering standards, code review, and the technical growth of the team