Tenex
Forward Deployed Engineer, Machine Learning
New York City
Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 27 days ago
Machine LearningCollaborationProblem Solving
About the role
- 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.
Responsibilities
- A private equity firm wants an internal tool that gives the portfolio support team an agentic copilot over every company in the portfolio. One FDE builds the v1, ships it into production, and iterates with the team that uses it.
- Own features end-to-end. Architecture, implementation, deploy, the relationship with the client engineer reviewing your PR. Nothing gets handed off
- 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
- 3 to 8 years building and shipping production software end-to-end, with a track record of turning complex problems into clean, scalable systems
- 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
- You get to ship production AI systems alongside the labs building the technology, not as a downstream integrator but as a peer with Anthropic and OpenAI's Applied AI teams.
- Own features end-to-end.
- Design agent systems that are reliable, auditable, and keep humans in the loop where they belong.
- You manage parallel workstreams across multiple clients without losing clarity or quality.
- An FDE designs the routing layer, prototypes it with Claude, and partners with the client's engineering team to roll it out across three hospitals.
Skills
- Experience shipping a production agentic system end-to-end (not a POC)
Compensation
- This role has uncapped cash compensation. The guaranteed base is $180,000, and engineers in good standing make significantly more than that in quarterly bonuses.
- Variable pay scales directly with output. The quarterly quota is 562.5 story points, and every story point delivered above quota is paid out at $80 per point in quarterly payouts.
- When determining compensation, we consider job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
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.
- A healthcare system has the data and the strategy and needs the workflow.
Company info
- what does it mean to run this business if AI does half the work in five years?
- Most don't know how to answer.
- That's why they call us.
- Tenex is the partner ambitious companies hire when the stakes are too high to get AI wrong.
- We embed elite teams directly into their operations, find the bets that actually move the business, and ship the work that makes them AI-native.
- The problems are unforgiving.
- We get to do this work alongside the people building the frontier.
- Anthropic and OpenAI are formal partners, and we sit in the room with their Applied AI teams on real client problems.
- Vercel, Lovable, and a growing list of the most important companies in AI are partners too.
- The bar for joining is high.
- We hire people with high agency and high urgency, who care less about where they trained and more about what they've built.
- If you want to spend the next chapter of your career shipping production AI systems alongside the best engineers in the industry and the labs building the technology, this is the place.
- The clients are sharp.
- The work has to land.
This listing is sourced directly from Tenex's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.