Forward Deployed Engineer

This a high bar role, If you do not meet the requirements please don't apply

About the Company

Our Client embeds elite teams directly into Fortune 500 operations to find the best that actually move the business and ship the work that makes them AI-native. Anthropic and OpenAI are formal partners, and Tenex sits in the room with their Applied AI teams on real client problems; Vercel, Lovable, and other leading AI companies also partner with our client. They were the partner Anthropic named for the Claude for Small Business launch, delivering AI fluency training across 10 US cities, with workflows it built now shipping within Claude for Small Business.

Fully bootstrapped with no outside funding, founded about a year ago by a team that includes a founder with a prior successful company under their belt. Grew from 5 people to 40 in a year, with 80 expected by the end of the quarter and 150-200 by year's end. Beyond consulting, they are exploring joint ventures with clients that combine client distribution with their technical capability, plus its own IP products going to market independently.

About the Role

Our client works in pods: a small group of strategists and engineers embeds with a client, learns the domain, and owns the problem end-to-end. Forward Deployed Engineers make the strategists' bets real by working as genuine client-facing software engineers who design, develop, and maintain modern web and agentic applications.

The bar is high agency and high urgency, with less weight on where someone trained and more on what they've actually built. The pace is real, and the standard is that work ships and lands: what counts is whether the workflow is still running on Monday morning when nobody from Tenex is in the room, not the demo. Most people who thrive here describe it as the steepest growth of their careers; the trade-off is not having a year to perfect any single system. This is not a mandated always-on culture, but it is not a standard 40-hour week either: if a deliverable isn't done by Friday, the expectation is to grind through the weekend to land it right, not to wait until Monday.

They also considers intact teams of two to five people (from a pivoting venture, a layoff, or simply a group ready to build together) as a unit, running them through the same bar as individual hires and extending offers to the whole team at once.

What You'll Own

• Design, build, and maintain modern web and agentic applications directly for Fortune 500 clients
• Own technical initiatives end-to-end, from architecture through production delivery
• Operate with high autonomy in ambiguous, fast-moving client environments
• Present technical work and architecture directly to clients in a clear, consultative way
• Travel to client sites roughly once a month to work in person with stakeholders
  

Requirements

Must-Have

• 3+ years of professional software engineering experience (sweet spot 3-8 years, no hard cap)
• Demonstrated experience designing, developing, and maintaining modern web or agentic applications
• Experience leading technical initiatives as a tech lead, team lead, founding engineer, or comparable high-ownership capacity
• Comfortable operating with high autonomy in ambiguous situations
• Genuine client-facing or customer-facing experience: comfortable presenting technical work directly to non-technical stakeholders
  

Nice-to-Have

• Experience as a co-founder or CTO at a tech startup
• Computer science or engineering degree
• Founded or contributed early at a small AI software development shop, even without major traction
• Comfortable using agentic coding tools as part of daily workflow
  

They pay a guaranteed base with an uncapped variable that scales directly with shipped work, tracked through an internal story-point system tied to client engagements.

Salary base: $180,000

Variable structure: a quarterly bonus once an engineer is

Typical outcomes: engineers in good standing generally earn an additional $10,000-$15,000 per quarter beyond base pay; top performers have earned $60,000-$80,000 in a single quarter.

Additional upside: performance-based, discretionary bonus becomes available on top of the story-point bonus as leveling frameworks roll out.

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