Founding Member of Technical Staff

a16z-speedrun; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Tenera is building the product decision layer for AI agents and humans, grounded in real user behavior and business context. As Founding Member of Technical Staff, you’ll own features end to end across agent infrastructure, backend systems, and frontend product experiences.

You’ll help define the technical direction, architecture, and engineering culture from day one, shipping high-quality code and collaborating directly with the founders.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience shipping production full-stack applications.

Responsibilities

• Build and own our harness loop: the evals, tests, and quality gates that allow agents to ship safely into production.

Skills

Next.js

React

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

Prisma

pgvector

Async Python

git worktrees

Modal/Temporal/Celery

LLM infrastructure

Customer communications

Code quality/testing

Frontend/Backend full-stack

Tools

PostgreSQL

Prisma

pgvector

Modal

Temporal

Celery

GitHub Actions

Job description

Founding Member of Technical Staff

Location: San Francisco, CA - in person
Type: Full-time
Compensation: Meaningful equity

About Tenera

Tenera is building the product decision layer for agents and humans using simulated users. We help teams validate what they build across the software development lifecycle by grounding AI personas in real user behavior and business context, then testing whether those personas make the right product decisions.

Our co-founders have built and shipped products at Amazon, Nvidia, and Uber, and are alumni of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. We’re a small, highly ambitious team hiring our first engineer.

This is a rare opportunity to help build something genuinely new at the intersection of product, engineering, AI agents, and human decision‑making.

We want to work with people who live in the future.

The Role

As Tenera’s first Member of Technical Staff, you’ll work directly with the founders to own features end to end across agent infrastructure, backend systems, and frontend product experiences.

You’ll help define our technical direction, architecture, and engineering culture from day one.

We’re looking for someone who is agent‑native in their engineering workflow: comfortable orchestrating multiple coding agents, setting up strong scaffolding and evaluation loops, and shipping quickly without compromising quality.

At the same time, you should be deeply technical where it matters most: database architecture, system tradeoffs, performance, infrastructure, and product‑critical engineering decisions.

This role is for someone who can move fluidly between product thinking, customer conversations, infrastructure, frontend, backend, and deep technical architecture.

What You’ll Do

• Build and own our harness loop: the evals, tests, and quality gates that allow agents to ship safely into production.

• Orchestrate multiple coding agents in parallel using worktrees, isolated environments, shared context, and strong review practices.

• Ship full‑stack features across our TypeScript, React, and Next.js frontend and our Postgres backend.

• Own important architecture decisions across schema design, performance, reliability, and system tradeoffs.

• Build async Python workers for enrichment, scoring, and heavy compute workflows.

• Work directly with customers to scope problems, gather feedback, explain tradeoffs, and build trust.

• Improve our core AI models, pipelines, and agent workflows as we learn from real‑world usage.

• Set a high bar for code quality, testing, engineering process, and product taste.

Our Stack

Frontend

Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind

Backend

PostgreSQL, Prisma, pgvector

Infrastructure

Vercel, Supabase, Modal

AI / ML

Custom RAG pipelines, agent orchestration, evaluation systems

Data

Large‑scale data channel scrapers, web and PDF crawling, enrichment pipelines, MCP tooling

Observability & Testing

PostHog, Playwright, GitHub Actions

What We’re Looking For

• 3+ years of experience shipping production full‑stack applications.

• Strong experience with Next.js, React, and TypeScript.

• Strong PostgreSQL experience, ideally with Prisma or a similar ORM.

• Bonus: experience with pgvector or vector databases.

• Comfort building async Python workers using tools like Modal, Temporal, Celery, or similar.

• Hands‑on experience using and orchestrating coding agents in real engineering workflows.

• Familiarity with git worktrees, isolated development environments, and parallelized agent workflows.

• Experience with LLM infrastructure, including RAG, prompt orchestration, tracing, or evaluation.

• A QA‑driven approach to development. You test what you ship.

• Experience working directly with customers and communicating technical tradeoffs clearly.

• Strong product taste and a high bar for quality.

• Curiosity about the latest AI and engineering tools.

• A love of building ambitious, useful, and technically interesting products.

Who You Are

• High agency and proactive.

• Comfortable identifying gaps and taking ownership.

• Thoughtful when pushing back, and aligned once a decision is made.

• Customer‑obsessed and willing to spend time with users.

• Confident without ego.

• Detail‑oriented with very high standards.

• Comfortable wearing many hats across product, engineering, infrastructure, and customer work.

• Energized by ambiguity, speed, and building from zero to one.