Founding Member of Technical Staff

Tenera Labs, Inc; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Tenera Labs, Inc is building simulation infrastructure to understand how humans choose, react, and decide. You will join as our first MTS to own features end to end across agent infrastructure, backend, and frontend in SF.

You will ship full-stack features with Next.js, React, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and async Python workers, while shaping architecture and engineering culture from day one. You’ll collaborate with the co-founders and customers to align product, backend, and data needs.

Qualifications

• 3+ years shipping production full-stack apps.
• Expertise in Next.js, React, and TypeScript.
• Strong PostgreSQL and Prisma experience.
• Experience writing async Python workers.
• Experience orchestrating multiple coding agents.
• QA-driven development habit.
• Customer-facing experience.
• Strong product sense.

Responsibilities

• Build and own the harness loop, enabling safe code shipping by agents.
• Orchestrate multiple coding agents in parallel with proper state management.
• Ship full-stack features across Next.js/React frontend and Postgres backend.
• Own architecture decisions regarding schema design and performance tradeoffs.
• Develop async Python workers for enrichment and heavy compute.
• Talk directly with customers to scope problems and communicate tradeoffs.
• Improve core models and pipelines based on real-world usage.
• Set a high bar for code quality, testing, and engineering practices.

Skills

Full-stack development

Customer communication

Product sense

Proactive ownership

Time management

Tools

Next.js

React

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

Prisma

pgvector

Modal

Temporal

Celery

Git

Job description

Tenera is a human behavior simulation lab. We help teams predict how real users will react to a new product, marketing campaign, or design variation before a single real user sees it. Our simulated users are grounded in real user behavior and business context, then tested against past product decisions to prove they make the right calls.

One of us took a single experiment to +$300M a year at Uber and scaled a product from zero to a $130M run rate in six months. The other built the synthetic-user systems behind eight-figure partnerships and owned pipelines moving billions of events at Amazon and Nvidia, across a career of founding and leading AI teams. Stanford, Waterloo, and CMU between us.

This is the kind of role you won't find anywhere else. You'll help build something genuinely new: simulation infrastructure for understanding how humans choose, react, and decide.

We want to meet people who live in the future.

02 The Role

As Tenera's first MTS hire, you'll work directly with the co-founders to own features end to end across agent infrastructure, backend, and frontend. You'll help shape our technical direction, architecture, and engineering culture from day one.

You'll need to be agent-native in how you work. That means orchestrating multiple coding agents in parallel, shipping quickly without sacrificing quality, and thinking like an architect rather than a line-by-line reviewer. You'll set up the scaffolding, evals, and review patterns, and let agents do the heavy lifting.

At the same time, you'll go deep on the architecture decisions that matter most: database schema design, performance optimization, system tradeoffs. The high-leverage technical work that can't be delegated. You'll wear multiple hats autonomously, moving between product, infrastructure, customer conversations, and deep technical work as the day demands.

If you're still writing every function by hand, this isn't the role for you. If you're delegating everything to agents without owning the architecture, this isn't the role either.

• Build and own the harness loop, our system of evals, tests, and quality gates that lets agents ship code into the product without breaking it. This is the single most important thing you'll do here.
• Orchestrate multiple coding agents in parallel, managing worktrees, concurrency, state, and shared context so agents can ship simultaneously without stepping on each other.
• Ship full-stack features across our TypeScript and React frontend and Postgres backend.
• Own the architecture decisions that matter: schema design, performance, system tradeoffs.
• Develop async Python workers for enrichment, scoring, and heavy compute.
• Talk directly with customers. Scope problems, gather feedback, communicate tradeoffs clearly. We encourage our engineers to be in the room with users, not behind them.
• Improve our core models and pipelines over time as we learn from real-world usage.
• Set the bar for code quality, testing, and engineering practices across the team.

04 Our Stack

Frontend

Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind

PostgreSQL with Prisma, pgvector

Infrastructure

Vercel, Supabase, Modal

AI / ML

Data

26+ data channel scrapers, web and PDF crawling and enrichment, MCP server exposing ~50 tools

Observability & Testing

PostHog, Playwright, GitHub Actions

05 What We're Looking For

• 3+ years shipping production full-stack apps, with strong command of Next.js, React, and TypeScript.
• Strong PostgreSQL and Prisma (or similar ORM). Bonus points for pgvector or vector database experience.
• Comfortable writing async Python workers (Modal, Temporal, Celery, or similar).
• Hands-on experience orchestrating multiple coding agents in parallel. You're fluent with git worktrees, isolated workspaces, and managing agent state across concurrent tasks.
• QA-driven development habit. You test what you ship.
• A track record of working directly with customers. Not just shipping for them, but communicating with them well: scoping problems, explaining tradeoffs, building trust.
• Above-average product taste. You know what good looks like.
• Proactively study the latest AI and engineering frameworks. You're already playing with what dropped last week.

06 Who You Are

• Proactive and high agency. You see gaps and fill them.
• Push back thoughtfully, and align once a direction is set.
• Customer-obsessed. You want to talk to users.
• Appropriate ego, good vibes. Confident without being a pain.
• The highest standard. You sweat the details others miss.
• Wears multiple hats autonomously. You move between product, infrastructure, customers, and deep technical work without missing a beat.
• A good timekeeper. You show up on time, keep meetings moving, and respect everyone's calendar.