Tenex · New York City
Tenex is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers as teams of two to five who apply together with a group they have already worked with. The work covers client projects end to end, including LLM agent systems, evals, and production AI for C-suite clients. Engineers lead projects in pods run by an engineering manager.
Most companies hire one person at a time and hope the chemistry works out later. We would rather skip that step. If you have already built something hard with a group of people you trust, bring them with you.
Tenex builds frontier AI that works in the real world. Our engineers sit with C-suite leaders, find where AI adds the most value, and ship bleeding-edge AI to production.
We were founded in New York City in 2025. We are currently 70 people and will double by the end of the year. We build for Fortune 500 companies across media, healthcare, retail, finance, and sports.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor are partners where we turn technology into reliable systems businesses use every day.
You’ll own client projects end to end: find where AI adds real value, decide the technical plan, build the whole system, and keep improving it in production. You’ll lead a few projects at a time in a pod run by an engineering manager.
We look for engineers who:
You will learn to structure work for agents, engineer context, evaluate outputs, and decide where people stay in control. Every project leaves behind agent systems, evals, and tools that make the next one faster.
The engineers we put in front of clients are the product, so hiring is the most important decision we make each week. Our engineers have worked at Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, AWS, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Oracle, and many have founded companies.
Most pay models were built before AI changed how fast engineers can work. Ours wasn’t: you get a base salary plus an uncapped quarterly bonus based on the work you ship, so the more you do with AI, the more you earn. Last quarter, every full-quarter engineer beat their baseline.
OTE $224K-$394K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus • 55/45 split
Tenex is intense by design. The pace is fast, and the standards are high. People share what they learn, challenge each other, and step in to help, so the bar is high and so is the support.
This is probably not the right place if you want a narrow scope, a predictable pace, or distance from customers. It is built for engineers who want responsibility, hard problems, and a steep learning curve.
We’re bootstrapped and profitable, and we reinvest what we earn into tools, research, and products of our own. Over time, that’s how we build a modern-day Bell Labs: a place where solving today’s problems gives us the means to tackle bigger ones.
This posting doesn’t list technologies. These are the ones Tenex uses across its other roles.