What we are building.
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.
Why now.
The model layer reached a usable bar twelve months ago. Connectivity reached the bar five years ago. The 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.
How we work.
Ship daily
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.
Async by default
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.
Care about details
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.
What we look for.
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.
Open roles.
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.
Engineering & AI 6
The people who build the product, the trading stack, and the AI behind both.
Operations & Capital 4
Finance, compliance, trading, and the legal posture that makes the rest possible.
Product & Design 2
The taste and judgement that decide what we build and how it feels.
Go-to-Market 2
Positioning, storytelling, and the measurable engine behind growth.
How we hire.
The process is short, transparent, and respects your time. Four steps, usually under three weeks end to end.
Send your work
Email careers@tengu.co, or apply here, 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.
Intro conversation
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.
Practical work session
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.
Founders and offer
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.
Tell us what you would build.
Send your work, your taste, and one paragraph on what you would change about Tengu in your first month.
We reply within five business days.