Forward Deployed Engineer
Catena Labs is building the first AI-native financial institution, a regulated entity designed for AI agents and their human collaborators. They aim to enable AI to securely identify itself and transact safely, providing a trusted partner for the new economic era of AI. Their services will leverage AI-native money, such as regulated stablecoins, and create bridges to traditional banking and payment systems to support the agent economy.
Funding
About Catena Labs
Catena Labs' internal building blocks include the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK), which is a free, open-source collection of patterns and components designed to address AI agent identity and payments. The source code and further information are available at agentcommercekit.com. The company invites interested parties to contact them to explore using their technology and services.
Skills
About the Role
You'll be the primary technical owner for building new capabilities with Catena's most important customers. You'll combine deep technical expertise with a genuine understanding of customer and business objectives, architecting, developing, and deploying software that helps enterprises put AI agents to work in the regulated financial system. You'll spend most of your time working alongside customers' teams to understand how they're integrating Catena, where they hit friction, and what it takes to enable the next level of capability. You'll act as the bridge between what Catena builds and what enterprises actually need to ship. When the field reveals something the platform should do better, you'll bring that back and help build it. You'll work closely with fellow engineers, product, and business teams to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes.
Requirements
- 5+ years of professional, hands-on full-stack development experience with languages such as TypeScript, Python, Go, or similar
- Track record of shipping complex, production-quality features from initial concept through production
- Ability to excel at rapid prototyping while maintaining appropriate quality standards
- Superb problem-solving skills and ability to understand customer needs and product/business context
- Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Ability to thrive in ambiguous environments with high ownership and entrepreneurial mindset
- Commitment to building systems that are performant, reliable, and secure
- Fluency with AI development tools such as Claude Code and Codex as part of daily workflow
- Experience in fintech, payments, blockchain, or regulated financial infrastructure (nice to have)
- Hands-on experience building AI-driven solutions or integrating with modern AI toolkits (nice to have)
- Experience writing agent skills (nice to have)
- Genuine curiosity about AI agents, stablecoins, and programmable identity (nice to have)
- Proficiency with TypeScript, Python, React (nice to have)
- Contributions to open-source projects or published work (nice to have)
Responsibilities
- Work directly with customers to understand their technical and operational objectives, scope requirements, and prototype and propose solutions then build them
- Design, code, and launch features that improve and innovate on Catena's core platform, including applications, APIs, and SDKs
- Build and configure agent identity and credentialing systems within customer environments
- Drive product deployments end-to-end: configuration, policy setup, testing, and troubleshooting across diverse technical environments
- Dive deep into customer codebases to understand product usage, surface friction points, and identify opportunities for improvement
- Champion customer success and ensure the team understands, prioritizes, and acts on customer feedback
- Partner with internal stakeholders to align product roadmap and strategy with customer needs