Forward Deployed Engineer

Tenex; New York (NY); On-site; USD 162,000 - 198,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive medical insurance

Dental and vision plans

Health Savings Account options

Employer-paid life and disability insurance

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Tenex is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer based in New York City to join their team in shipping production AI systems. This role requires 3 to 8 years of experience in software development and the ability to integrate AI into workflows that change client operations.

Compensation is uncapped, starting at $180,000 base, with additional earnings based on throughput. Benefits include comprehensive medical, life insurance, and flexible PTO.

Qualifications

• 3 to 8 years of experience in building and shipping production software.
• Experience using AI as a core part of your work.
• Ability to manage multiple client workstreams effectively.

Responsibilities

• Design workflows that apply to real client problems.
• Own features end-to-end and ensure they are production-ready.
• Use AI tools to improve coding efficiency and output.

Skills

Building production software

Using AI tools for coding

Operational discipline

Collaborative rigor

Tools

Claude Code

Codex

Cursor

Job description

About Tenex

The Fortune 500 is rebuilding itself right now. Every company over a billion in revenue is asking the same question: 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 clients are sharp. The problems are unforgiving. The work has to land.

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. 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 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.

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. The plan becomes the running system because you built it.

You work close to the problem and close to the client. Architecture decisions are yours. The code is yours. The credit and the consequences are yours. You partner with Strategists to choose the right bets, with client engineering teams to ship inside their stack, and with the latest agentic coding tools to move at speeds that weren't possible a year ago.

The bar for the work is that ships and it lands. Demos don't count. Prototypes that never make it to production don't count. What counts is the workflow running on Monday morning when nobody from Tenex is in the room, the business outcome it drives, and the story the client tells about what changed.

Compensation reflects this. Your base is guaranteed, your variable pay is uncapped, and your throughput is measured directly. Engineers in good standing make significantly more than base.

You'll work alongside AI Strategists, Solution Architects, and our partner teams at Anthropic, OpenAI, Vercel, and beyond. Plan on traveling to client sites about once a month.

What You'll Do

A few engagements in flight today, to give you a sense of the work:

• A national insurer needs an agent that handles tier-1 claims disputes inside a fifteen-year-old claims platform. The Forward Deployed Engineer on the engagement learns the stack, ships the agent, and stays on to iterate as volume scales.

• A healthcare system has the data and the strategy and needs the workflow. 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.

• 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.

Across engagements, you'll:

• Own features end-to-end. Architecture, implementation, deploy, the relationship with the client engineer reviewing your PR. Nothing gets handed off

• Use every agentic coding tool that gives you leverage. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, whatever ships next week. Your throughput is measured and your pay scales with it

• Ramp into unfamiliar codebases. Sometimes a Fortune 500 monolith in a language you haven't touched in years. Sometimes a stack that was built last quarter. You get productive without a lot of hand-holding

• 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

• Make the team better. The workflow refinements you discover on one engagement get adopted across every other engagement. Your wins compound across the firm

What You'll Bring

• 3 to 8 years building and shipping production software end-to-end, with a track record of turning complex problems into clean, scalable systems

• AI as a core part of how you work. You use agentic coding tools to raise the quality and the throughput of everything you ship

• Intellectual curiosity and range. You track how the AI landscape evolves (new models, new tools, new techniques) and you bring what you learn back to the team

• 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

• Collaborative rigor. You hold yourself and others to a high standard, contribute actively to team knowledge, and make the people around you more effective

Bonus Points

• Public artifacts of your work: open source contributions, a side project people use, a blog post or talk on applied AI engineering that landed

• Experience shipping a production agentic system end-to-end (not a POC)

Why Tenex

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. You get to do it for clients whose codebases run businesses worth billions. The throughput tools are real, the autonomy is real, the consequences are real, and the team you ship with is the kind of group you don't get to assemble twice in a career.

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. Take what you need.

Our 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. Faster collaboration, real-time problem solving, stronger relationships, sharper execution.