Bring Your Own Pod

Tenex; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

HSA/Healthcare FSA

Life insurance

Disability insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

Tenex is reshaping how AI work gets done by embedding elite teams directly into client operations. We are looking for teams of two to five people who can go through a single, cohesive hiring process and start on a first project together in New York City.

Our partners include Anthropic and OpenAI, and we ship complex AI work with high agency and urgency. You will work in a close-knit pod, owning problems end-to-end and growing rapidly.

Skills

Team collaboration

Job description

Apply as a team of two to five

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.

About Tenex

The Fortune 500 is rebuilding itself around AI right now, and the companies that cannot afford to get it wrong are the ones that call us. Tenex embeds elite teams directly into a client's operations, finds the bets that actually move the business, and ships the work that makes them AI-native. The clients are sharp, the problems are unforgiving, and the work has to land.

We get to do this 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. We were the partner Anthropic named on the Claude for Small Business launch, delivering AI fluency training in ten US cities, and workflows we built ship inside Claude for Small Business today.

The bar for joining is high. We hire for high agency and high urgency, and we care less about where you trained than about what you have built.

Why we do this

Tenex works in pods. A small group of strategists and engineers embeds with a client, learns the domain, and owns the problem end to end. That structure is the whole point of the company, so a team that already knows how to build together is not an awkward fit for us. It is a head start.

When a team that has earned each other's trust shows up intact, the part that usually takes months, learning how everyone thinks and where to lean on each other, is already done. You spend that time on the actual work instead.

So if your venture is pivoting, your group got caught in a layoff, or you are simply ready to build the next thing together, we want to talk to all of you at once. We are looking for teams of roughly two to five people.

What we are not doing

We are not buying a team to break it apart and slot people into narrow lanes. The way you already work together is part of what we are hiring. We will protect it.

How it happens

We keep it simple, and we keep your team together through all of it.

• You go through together. We run your team through the same process as a cohort, against the same bar we hold every Tenex hire to. We evaluate each of you as an individual and the group as a unit.

• One decision. If we move forward, offers go out to the whole team at the same time. Each person accepts or declines on their own, though we are hoping for a clean sweep.

• One first engagement. We work to staff you together on your first project so you start on familiar footing.

To be clear about the bar: every person on the team needs to clear the same standard as everyone else at Tenex. We assess the team on top of that, not instead of it.

Where you would fit

At Tenex, Strategists scope and prioritize the bets, and Forward Deployed Engineers make them real. Most teams map onto the roles we are already hiring for:

• Forward Deployed Engineer

• Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

• Staff Forward Deployed Engineer

• AI Strategist

How we build

We take the discipline of real software engineering and point it at frontier AI, which is messy and non-deterministic by nature. We frame work as testable hypotheses, build data sets that hold up over time, and care a lot about whether a system still works months after we have handed it off. We use every agentic coding tool that gives us leverage, and we do it alongside our partner teams at Anthropic and OpenAI. We have shipped enough applied AI to have strong opinions about what makes it to production, and we will happily argue them with you.

What the work is actually like

The pace is real, and the bar is that the work ships and it lands. Demos do not count. What counts is the workflow running on Monday morning when nobody from Tenex is in the room. You will touch more products in a year here than you would in several years somewhere slower, with a lot of autonomy and your throughput measured directly. The trade is that you do not get a year to perfect any single system. Most people who thrive here describe it as the steepest growth of their career. Some find the pace is not for them, and the interview is a good time to ask our team directly what it feels like day to day.

Compensation

Your base is guaranteed and your variable pay is uncapped, scaling directly with what you ship. Engineers in good standing make significantly more than base. We will walk your whole team through the details during the process.

Workplace

We work in person from our New York City office five days a week. The best ideas come from being in the same room. Plan on traveling to client sites about once a month.

Benefits

• Comprehensive medical (PPO and HSA options), dental, and vision

• HSA, Healthcare FSA, and Commuter Benefits

• 100% employer-paid life insurance and AD&D

• 100% employer-paid long-term disability insurance

• Responsible PTO. Take what you need.