Small team. Real product. Live capital. If you want to work on something that matters with people who care about getting it right, we would love to hear from you.
Tengu is a vertical AI agent for retail markets. We connect to twenty-five brokerages, read every position in real time, talk to users in chat, and run subscribed strategies inside their broker, all on one engine.
The product is honest. Tengu never holds funds. Trades route through the user's existing broker. Every claim the AI makes cites a real filing, print, or quote. Risk gates run before every order. The system either does the right thing or refuses; there is no middle.
We are doing this because the smartest AI on Earth knows nothing about your portfolio. ChatGPT and Claude are generalists. Bloomberg costs twenty-four thousand a year. Plaid does not trade. Tengu sits between all of these and serves the person who actually owns the money.
The model layer reached a usable bar twelve months ago. Connectivity reached the bar five years ago. The Venn intersection is a product that can hold a real conversation about a real portfolio and act on it inside the user's broker. Nobody at scale is doing that yet because most companies anchor to either the AI side or the finance side; the people who can hold both are rare.
We are building from the ground up with that intersection as the starting point, not a retrofit. The trading stack is in production. The AI stack is in production. The marketplace is open. Live capital is on the line every market day. The work now is to keep the bar where it is while we scale every part of it.
Production deploys multiple times a day. Small commits, fast review, no committees. The wall between writing code and watching real users hit it should be measured in minutes, not weeks.
Most of the team is remote. We default to long-form writing over meetings. When we pair, it is because pairing is the right tool, not because someone scheduled a sync.
Typography matters. So does the wording of an error message. So does the latency of a chart. We are not above any layer of the stack and we do not ship things we would not show our smartest friend.
Builders who own outcomes. People who care about the user's actual experience, not the size of the team or the title on the org chart. Generalists who can move across stack, design, and product when the problem requires it.
We hire for taste. Sample the work you are proud of and we will read it. Send a code repo, a piece of writing, a designed surface, a paper you published, a product you shipped. The medium does not matter. The clarity of thought does.
You do not need a finance background. Several of us did not have one when we joined. You do need the patience to read a 10-K, the curiosity to understand why the market moved the way it did, and the discipline to ship something useful inside a month.
We hire slowly. Founding roles are the first hires on a team and carry the most equity and the most scope. If you do not see a perfect fit but you are exceptional, write to us anyway. The best people we have worked with would not have matched any job description we could have written in advance.
The people who build the product, the trading stack, and the AI behind both.
You own the path from "user hits Buy" to "broker fills the order." Brokerage connectivity (SnapTrade, Plaid, IBKR, Kraken), order router, pre-trade risk gates, deterministic replay, and the live capital backbone. If you have built or operated a brokerage, dark pool, OMS, or matching engine, this is your seat.
You own how Tengu thinks. Multi-model routing across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and Perplexity; tool use and agents over real portfolio context; evals and red-teaming on financial reasoning; the prompt + retrieval + memory layers that make Ask Tengu credible. Past work on LLM products with measured reliability gains is the signal.
TypeScript, React, Postgres, AWS. You ship to production on day one and own product surfaces end to end, from a SQL query to a pixel. Generalist instinct; preference for shipping over scaffolding.
You own the systems behind the systems. ECS / Fargate, OIDC-only deploys, observability that actually catches outages before users do, schema migrations under live load, secret rotation, blue/green and circuit-breaker rollouts. The job is fewer 3am pages and more confident deploys.
You own the security posture for a product that touches real brokerage credentials and real capital. Envelope encryption, KMS, key rotation, SOC 2 Type II, threat modelling for the order path, responsible disclosure. Comfort writing policy AND reading the code that implements it.
You generate the alpha behind Tengu-authored strategies and the eval framework for marketplace authors. Factor research, regime-aware sizing, transaction-cost modelling, robust backtesting. Track record of strategies that survived live deployment is what matters here.
Finance, compliance, trading, and the legal posture that makes the rest possible.
You run capital strategy at a company that holds none of it. Fundraising, board-pack discipline, KPI architecture, FP&A, treasury, audit prep, and the institutional posture that lets us sit across the table from broker partners and lenders. Public-markets or fintech CFO/VP-Finance experience strongly preferred.
You own our live capital book and the relationships with the broker partners we route through. Microstructure intuition, daily P&L discipline, and the operational chops to keep the production trading stack quiet at 9:30am. Sell-side trading desk or buy-side execution background is the right shape.
You build the compliance program from policy through paper trail. Broker agreements, KYC/AML posture with our connectivity partners, state-by-state registration analysis, marketing-review process, and the boring-but-load-bearing work that lets a software company sit one step from regulated finance.
Corporate, regulatory, IP, commercial. Drafts and negotiates broker, data, and marketplace-author agreements; partners with Compliance on the regulatory edge; supports fundraising and corporate governance. Open to fractional engagement first and conversion to GC as the company grows.
The taste and judgement that decide what we build and how it feels.
You design every surface: the in-app dashboard, the AI conversation layer, the marketplace, the public site, the iOS app. Strong taste in typography, motion, and information density. You work in Figma, but more often you work in the codebase with the engineers shipping the surface.
You run the loop from customer signal to shipped surface. Synthesise sessions with power users, run product experiments with a statistician's honesty, hold a strong roadmap point of view, and let engineering own implementation. We are tiny, so the title is "PM" but the job is half product, half operator.
Positioning, storytelling, and the measurable engine behind growth.
You write, ship, and measure. Strong opinions on positioning and on what counts as a real story. Comfortable on camera, comfortable in the analytics tab, comfortable shipping a landing page without waiting for design. Range over depth at this stage.
You own measurable acquisition. Paid social, SEO, referral, partnerships, lifecycle, and the disciplined experimentation behind each one. We will not buy our way to product-market fit, but once we have it we want to compound. Growth experience at a consumer fintech that hit scale is the right pattern.
Not seeing your role? Write directly to careers@tengu.co with what you would build in your first month.
The process is short, transparent, and respects your time. Four steps, usually under three weeks end to end.
Email careers@tengu.co with a sample of work you are proud of and one paragraph on what you would change about Tengu in your first month. We read everything.
Thirty minutes with a founder or hiring manager. Why you, why us, why now. We will be direct about whether the role is a fit.
A scoped, time-boxed exercise in your medium: a code session, a design crit, a writing brief, a financial model. We pay for anything over two hours.
Two more conversations across the team, a reference call, and an offer. We close in days, not weeks. You meet the people you would actually work with.
Send your work, your taste, and one paragraph on what you would change about Tengu in your first month.
Write to careersWe reply within five business days.