Customer-Embedded AI Security Engineer

Tenex; Kansas City, Sarasota, Scottsdale, San Jose (MO, FL, AZ, CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Tenex is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer who embeds within strategic customer accounts to understand environments, workflows, and security challenges, and to build solutions combining AI, data, and security expertise. Your work extends beyond a single customer to inform platform-wide development.

You will collaborate with AI & Data Science, maintain strong stakeholder relationships, and ship custom automations, integrations, and AI-assisted workflows while navigating a fast-paced startup

Qualifications

• 3+ years in software engineering, security engineering, or a technical customer-facing role.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or another general-purpose language (Go, TypeScript, etc.).
• Experience working directly with customers to solve complex technical problems.
• Familiarity with AI/ML tooling, data pipelines, or data engineering concepts.
• Knowledge of security operations, SIEM/SOAR, cloud security, or endpoint security.
• Ability to rapidly prototype and ship working solutions in ambiguous, fast-changing environments.
• Strong technical documentation skills — you write things down so they can scale.

Responsibilities

• Embed directly within assigned customer accounts to deeply understand their environment, workflows, and security challenges
• Follow the FDE engagement loop: Discover, Ideate, Document, Build, Ship — moving from problem identification to working solution with a bias toward action
• Build custom solutions tailored to customer needs — including automations, integrations, AI-assisted workflows, data pipelines, and security tooling extensions
• Apply combined expertise across AI, data, and security to solve problems that off-the-shelf tools cannot address
• Document solutions thoroughly so they can be reviewed, refined, and offered to other customers across the platform
• Continuously identify and surface new problem areas, data opportunities, and intelligence gaps encountered during customer engagements — feeding these discoveries into the AI & DS function for evaluation and development
• Collaborate closely with the AI & Data Science function — surfacing cross-customer intelligence needs directly from customer engagements
• Maintain a strong working relationship with customer technical stakeholders throughout the engagement
• Manage multiple active customer accounts concurrently, maintaining deep focus and high-quality output across each engagement
• Escalate blockers or account risks to the Director or Staff-level engineers when appropriate

Skills

Python

Customer-facing

AI/ML tooling

Data pipelines

Security operations

Prototyping

Technical documentation

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / Cybersecurity / Engineering

CISSP / CISM / GIAC / cloud certs

Tools

SIEM/SOAR familiarity

Cloud security familiarity

Job description

Tenex is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer who embeds within strategic customer accounts to understand environments, workflows, and security challenges, and to build solutions combining AI, data, and security expertise. Your work extends beyond a single customer to inform platform-wide development.

You will collaborate with AI & Data Science, maintain strong stakeholder relationships, and ship custom automations, integrations, and AI-assisted workflows while navigating a fast-paced startup