Forward Deployed AI Engineer

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at TENEX, you are a customer-embedded problem solver. You live inside strategic customer accounts, discover what is broken or missing, and build solutions - combining AI, data, and security expertise to ship things that matter. Your work doesn't stay in one customer's environment; it feeds back into what TENEX builds for everyone.

Job 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

Required Skills & Qualifications

Technical & Industry Expertise

• 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

Soft Skills

• Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills with a bias toward action
• Excellent customer-facing communication and collaboration abilities
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, high-performance startup environment
• Passion for cybersecurity, automation, and continuous improvement

Education & Certifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience)
• Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CISM, GIAC certifications, Google Cloud Professional, Microsoft SC-200/AZ-500, or AWS Certified Solutions Architect are a plus