AI/ML Engineer II

Company Overview TENEX is an AI-native, automation-first, built-for-scale Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provider. We are a force multiplier for defenders, helping organizations enhance their cybersecurity posture through advanced threat detection, rapid response, and continuous protection. Our team is composed of industry experts with deep experience in cybersecurity, automation, and AI-driven solutions. Backed by leading investors, we are rapidly growing and seeking top talent to join our mission of revolutionizing the AI-Native MDR landscape.

We’re a fast-growing startup backed by industry experts and top-tier investors led by Crosspoint Capital Partners and also backed by Shield Capital, DTCP (formerly Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners), Deepwork Capital, and the Florida Opportunity Fund. Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). As an early employee, you’ll play a meaningful role in defining and building our culture. Get in on the ground floor. We’re a small but well-funded team that just raised a substantial round – joining now comes with limited risk and unlimited upside.

As an AI/ML II Engineer at TENEX, you will be a key technical contributor responsible for designing, developing, and optimizing scalable, high-performance AI systems. You will play a crucial role in implementing our AI-driven cybersecurity solutions while collaborating across engineering teams and contributing to technical innovation.

Culture is one of the most important things at TENEX.AI—explore our culture deck at culture.tenex.ai to witness how we embody it, prioritizing the irreplaceable collaboration and community of in-person work.

Location: This role will require Monday - Thursday onsite in any of our locations. WFH Friday.

Job Responsibilities

• Project Execution: Ability to drive and deliver technical components of complex projects. This means communicating effectively to align on requirements, executing on high-quality code, and collaborating with senior engineers and stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle.
• AI Layer Engineering: Design & build the AI layer that powers autonomous detection, RAG-backed investigation, and auto-remediation workflows.
• Productionize Reasoning Engines: Develop and productionize large-scale LLMs, graph-based reasoning engines, and streaming feature pipelines that operate on billions of security events.
• Evaluation & Reliability: Own evaluation & reliability—from prompt libraries and fine-tuning to red-team testing, latency budgets, and fallback strategies.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner tightly with Product, Detection Engineering, and Customer Success to translate real-world attacker behavior into robust ML and rule-based detections.
• Push the Frontier: Experiment with retrieval-augmented generation, tool-calling agents, and multi-modal models (text + logs + graphs) to keep defenders decisively ahead.

Required Skills & Qualifications Software Engineering & Architecture Expertise

• Core Engineering: 3-5 years of experience in software development, engineering production systems using modern programming languages (Python, Go, Rust, or Java).
• Agentic Systems: Deep knowledge of agentic systems design, such as Centralized and/or Decentralized MAS (Multi-Agent Systems) architectures.
• Graph Architectures: Solid understanding of Graph structures and specifically graph databases.
• Orchestration Frameworks: Hands-on experience building agents, orchestration frameworks (LangChain/LangGraph, Agno AGI, or custom), and evaluation harnesses.
• Distributed Systems: Deep understanding of microservices architecture, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and event-driven systems.
• APIs: Strong fundamentals in API design (REST/gRPC) and distributed systems.

Soft Skills

• Communication: Clear, concise communication skills and a bias for collaborative problem-solving.
• Leadership Alignment: Proven track record of gathering consensus and guiding multi-stakeholder initiatives through uncertain boundaries.
• Analytical Rigor: Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.

Nice-to-have

• Domain Background: Prior work in cybersecurity (SIEM, EDR, SOAR, or MDR).
• Startup Mentality: Background driving high-impact engineering initiatives in high-growth startups or enterprise SaaS.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Familiarity with cloud infrastructure security (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

Education & Certifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’…