Forward Deployed Engineer

Catena Labs; Boston; On-site; PHP 6,079,027 - 9,118,540; Full time

Job summary

Catena Labs in Boston is seeking an exceptional Forward Deployed Engineer. In this role, you will be the primary technical owner, building AI capabilities with key customers in the financial sector. Your deep technical expertise combined with an understanding of customer objectives will help shape innovative solutions.

You'll collaborate with customers to understand their needs, design and launch features on Catena's core platform, and ensure they achieve their desired outcomes. The ideal candidate will have over 5 years of development experience and excellent communication skills.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of full-stack development experience.
• Experience shipping production-quality features.
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Work with customers to scope technical requirements.
• Design, code, and launch core platform features.
• Ensure customer success and gather feedback.

Skills

Full-stack development experience

TypeScript

Python

Go

Problem-solving skills

Excellent communication skills

Experience with AI development tools

Job description

Forward Deployed Engineer

We're looking for an exceptional Forward Deployed Engineer to be the primary technical owner for building new capabilities with Catena's most important customers. In this role, you'll combine deep technical expertise with a genuine understanding of customer and business objectives — architecting, developing, and deploying software that helps enterprises put AI agents to work in the regulated financial system.

Customer obsession is core to how we operate. You'll spend most of your time working alongside our customers' teams to understand how they're integrating Catena, where they hit friction, and what it takes to enable the next level of capability. You're the bridge between what Catena builds and what enterprises actually need to ship.

Every agent action at Catena flows through deterministic policies before execution — your job is to make sure our customers can build fully autonomous systems that they can trust: operating with complete observability over every agent intent, evaluation, and execution. When the field reveals something our platform should do better, you'll bring that back and help us build it.

You'll work closely with fellow engineers, product, and business teams to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes and are genuinely delighted by what we build.

What You'll Do

• Work directly with customers to understand their technical and operational objectives, scope requirements, and prototype and propose solutions — then build them

• Design, code, and launch features that improve and innovate on Catena's core platform, including the applications, APIs, and SDKs that enable secure, reliable commerce between AI agents and the financial system

• Build and configure agent identity and credentialing systems within customer environments, ensuring every agent can be verified and every transaction can be audited

• Drive product deployments end-to-end: configuration, policy setup, testing, and troubleshooting across diverse technical environments, including legacy financial infrastructure

• Dive deep into customer codebases to understand how they're using Catena's products, surface friction points, and identify opportunities for improvement

• Champion customer success — ensure Catena's team understands, prioritizes, and acts on customer feedback and pain points

• Partner with internal stakeholders to continuously align Catena's product roadmap and strategy with what customers actually need in the field

Who You Are

• 5+ years of professional, hands‑on full-stack development experience with languages such as TypeScript, Python, Go, or similar

• Track record of shipping complex, production‑quality features from initial concept through production

• Excel at rapid prototyping while maintaining appropriate quality standards

• Superb problem‑solving skills and an ability to understand customer needs and the product and business context of your work.

• Excellent communicator with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders; comfortable in a room with a customer, a compliance officer or a fellow engineer

• Thrives in ambiguous environments; high ownership, entrepreneurial mindset, deep sense of urgency

• Committed to building systems that are performant, reliable, and secure

• Fluent with AI development tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc) as a core part of your daily workflow; you direct, validate, and own the output

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, payments, blockchain, or regulated financial infrastructure

• Hands‑on experience building AI‑driven solutions or integrating with modern AI toolkits with public‑facing examples

• Experience writing agent skills and know when and how to reach for them.

• Genuine curiosity about AI agents, stablecoins, and programmable identity

• Proficiency with our core stack: TypeScript, Python, React

• Contributions to relevant open‑source projects or published work — code, blog posts, presentations, or papers

Why This Role Is Different

Most forward deployed roles drop you into mature products at mature companies. This one puts you at the front line of a category that doesn't exist yet. The problems are emerging and unsolved: how do you give an AI agent a verifiable identity, govern what it's allowed to do, and prove after the fact that it stayed within bounds — all within an existing organization. You'll be the person figuring this out with the first enterprises to ever attempt it, and what you learn in the field will directly shape the platform millions of agents eventually run on.

Join Us

Catena is pursuing a national trust bank charter because the agentic economy deserves the same regulatory foundation that underpins the rest of the financial system. If you want to be part of building that foundation — and work directly with the enterprises putting it to use — we want to hear from you.

You'll have the opportunity to work on challenging problems that have never been solved before, with a team that's defining an entirely new category of financial services.