The role

Tenex embeds engineering pods inside Fortune 500 companies to build and ship AI systems. Our AI Strategists and Forward Deployed Engineers work directly with client teams from the first week of an engagement, which means every person we hire has to be capable of representing us in a senior client environment almost immediately.

We are growing from 50 people to 150. That is approximately 100 hires, and the majority of them are Strategist and Engineer roles with a high bar and a competitive market.

Hiring is currently the most important and most difficult constraint on this business. It determines which engagements we can win, how well we deliver them, and how quickly we can grow. Nothing else we do matters if we cannot consistently find and assess the right people.

We will not reach 150 people by repeating the process that got us to 50. This role exists to build a hiring process that is repeatable, measurable, and fast enough to support that growth, and then to run it.

You will own the top of the funnel and candidate screening. That means you will source candidates, run outreach, conduct first round conversations, and determine who moves forward in the process.

This is an entry level role with an unusual amount of responsibility. You will speak with more candidates in your first year than most recruiters do in three, and your assessments will directly influence who we hire.

What you will own

Sourcing and outreach

You will identify and source candidates from MBB firms, Big 4 consultancies, Palantir, and AI-native companies, and you will develop new sources as the existing ones are exhausted.

You will write and run outbound campaigns over LinkedIn and email, and you will own the quality of that writing rather than sending templates someone else wrote.

You will test messaging variants against one another, measure reply and conversion rates, and discontinue approaches that do not perform.

Screening

You will conduct first round conversations with candidates across both the Strategist and Forward Deployed Engineer tracks, which requires you to understand what strong performance looks like in each.

You will assess candidates against our rubrics for technical depth, client presence, and ownership, and you will help improve those rubrics as you learn where they produce the wrong answer.

You will make screening recommendations and explain your reasoning to hiring managers, including in the cases where they initially disagree with your read.

Hiring data

You will own our hiring metrics, including pass through rates by stage and by source, time to offer, offer acceptance rate, and the points in the process where candidates most often withdraw.

You will present those numbers in weekly hiring reviews and recommend specific changes based on what they show, rather than reporting them and waiting for direction.

Process and documentation

You will maintain our compressed one week interview loop as candidate volume increases, which becomes meaningfully harder as more interviewers and more open roles enter the process.

You will document what works clearly enough that the next person we add to this team can execute it without your involvement.

You will identify the points where the process slows down or produces inconsistent outcomes, and you will propose and implement fixes.

Forward planning

You will build candidate relationships for roles we expect to open in the next two quarters, not only for roles that are open today.

Career progression

We want to be direct about how this role is intended to develop, because it is a significant part of what makes it worth taking.

This is not a permanent recruiting role. We are hiring you into talent because talent is the largest constraint on the business right now, and we need someone capable to own it.

After approximately twelve to eighteen months, assuming you have built a process that runs reliably and can be handed to someone else, we expect to move you into whatever the largest constraint on the business is at that time.

We cannot tell you today what that will be. Based on where the company is heading, the most likely areas are delivery operations, finance and revenue operations, client operations, or a role directly supporting our commercial function.