---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer at Catena'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-catena-united-states-7y1a05ftwmm7'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-14'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer at Catena

- **Company:** Catena
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-06-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-14
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/catena/a26bbbb9-1b60-40f1-a772-2f4214c784c7

## Job description

## FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER

We're looking for an exceptional Forward Deployed Engineer to be the primary technical owner for building new capabilities with Catena's most important customers. In this role, 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. Customer obsession is core to how we operate. You'll spend most of your time working alongside our 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're the bridge between what Catena builds and what enterprises actually need to ship. Every agent action at Catena flows through deterministic policies before execution — your job is to make sure our customers can build fully autonomous systems that they can trust: operating with complete observability over every agent intent, evaluation, and execution. When the field reveals something our platform should do better, you'll bring that back and help us build it. You'll work closely with fellow engineers, product, and business teams to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes and are genuinely delighted by what we build.

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

- 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 the applications, APIs, and SDKs that enable secure, reliable commerce between AI agents and the financial system
- Build and configure agent identity and credentialing systems within customer environments, ensuring every agent can be verified and every transaction can be audited
- Drive product deployments end-to-end: configuration, policy setup, testing, and troubleshooting across diverse technical environments, including legacy financial infrastructure
- Dive deep into customer codebases to understand how they're using Catena's products, surface friction points, and identify opportunities for improvement
- Champion customer success — ensure Catena's team understands, prioritizes, and acts on customer feedback and pain points
- Partner with internal stakeholders to continuously align Catena's product roadmap and strategy with what customers actually need in the field

## WHAT YOU’LL BRING

- 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
- Excel at rapid prototyping while maintaining appropriate quality standards
- Superb problem-solving skills and an ability to understand customer needs and the product and business context of your work.
- Excellent communicator with both technical and non-technical stakeholders; comfortable in a room with a customer, a compliance officer or a fellow engineer
- Thrives in ambiguous environments; high ownership, entrepreneurial mindset, deep sense of urgency
- Committed to building systems that are performant, reliable, and secure
- Fluent with AI development tools (Claude Code, Codex, etc) as a core part of your daily workflow; you direct, validate, and own the output

## NICE TO HAVE

- Experience in fintech, payments, blockchain, or regulated financial infrastructure
- Hands-on experience building AI-driven solutions or integrating with modern AI toolkits with public facing examples
- Experience writing agent skills and know when and how to reach for them.
- Genuine curiosity about AI agents, stablecoins, and programmable identity
- Proficiency with our core stack:TypeScript, Python, React
- Contributions to relevant open-source projects or published work — code, blog posts, presentations, or papers

## WHY THIS ROLE IS DIFFERENT

Most forward deployed roles drop you into mature products at mature companies. This one puts you at the front line of a category that doesn't exist yet. The problems are emerging and unsolved: how do you give an AI agent a verifiable identity, govern what it's allowed to do, and prove after the fact that it stayed within bounds — all within an existing organization. You'll be the person figuring this out with the first enterprises to ever attempt it, and what you learn in the field will directly shape the platform millions of agents eventually run on.

## JOIN US

Catena is pursuing a national trust bank charter because the agentic economy deserves the same regulatory foundation that underpins the rest of the financial system. If you want to be part of building that foundation — and work directly with the enterprises putting it to use — we want to hear from you. You'll have the opportunity to work on challenging problems that have never been solved before, with a team that's defining an entirely new category of financial services.

## About Catena

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Catena is building a regulated banking and governance platform purpose-built for AI agents, combining a technology platform with a national trust bank to create the first AI-native financial institution.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: Boston, United States
- **Founded**: 2022
- **Founders**: Sean Neville (CEO) and Matt Venables (CTO)

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Banking and financial infrastructure for AI agents (Fintech / AI Infrastructure)
- Target customers: B2B — businesses and developers deploying AI agents that need to handle money; enterprises running agentic workflows at scale
- Mission or purpose statement: To build the first regulated AI-native financial institution, ensuring that agents transact safely under human-defined policies.

## Products & Services
- **Catena Platform (Banking for Agents)**: A banking platform that gives AI agents programmable financial infrastructure — verified identities, accounts, stablecoin and fiat payments, yield, and liquidity — accessed via atomic, programmable services.
- **Catena Control Plane (Governance for Humans)**: A human-facing dashboard for setting policies, capping spending, restricting counterparties, approving transactions, and auditing every agent movement. Extends governance to non-custodial agent accounts and, in future, third-party provider accounts.
- **Private Access Program**: Early-access service for select businesses, covering trust & compliance (agent identity, reputation, governance) and financial operations (liquidity, risk management, yield).
- **Agent Commerce Kit (ACK)**: An open-source collection of patterns, components, and emerging protocols for verifiable agent identity, payment flows, and receipts between agents, humans, and businesses with integrated human oversight.
- **OCC National Trust Bank Charter (in progress)**: Pursuing federal regulatory status to operate as a direct, governed bank for agents, transitioning from partner-backed operations.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total financing of **$48 million** (Series A of $30M co-led by a16z crypto and Acrew, plus $18M Seed led by a16z crypto)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: a16z crypto (lead), Acrew (co-lead Series A), Breyer Capital (earliest supporter), Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Stanford Engineering, Pillar VC, General Catalyst, QED, Oak HC/FT, Fin Capital, IDG Capital, and angel investors including Tom Brady, Bradley Horowitz, Hamel Husain, Sam Palmisano, and Balaji Srinivasan.
- **Growth Signals**: Headcount grew **+87.5% YoY** to 11 employees (LinkedIn data); LinkedIn followers surged **+403.7% YoY** to 2,317; announced $30M Series A and OCC charter application in progress; platform now in Private Access with paying customers.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Regulatory moat**: Pursuing a National Trust Bank charter, positioning Catena as the first regulated financial institution purpose-built for AI agents — a defensible moat that legacy fintechs and unregulated platforms lack.
- **Policy-first architecture**: Every agent action flows through deterministic policies before execution — no exceptions — addressing the core risk of ungoverned agent financial activity.
- **Dual-surface design**: One platform serves agents (banking) and humans (control plane), solving a unique coordination problem in agentic finance.
- **Team pedigree**: Founded by co-creators of Circle and USDC (Sean Neville, Matt Venables), with team experience from Brex, Affirm, Adobe, Meta, PayPal, Block, Airbnb, and Airwallex.
- **Open-source strategy**: ACK creates ecosystem lock-in and developer mindshare while standardizing agent commerce.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scale Private Access**: Expand the customer base for agent banking and governance services.
- **Obtain OCC Charter**: Complete regulatory approval to become a direct, regulated national trust bank.
- **Hire aggressively**: Building out key roles (Head of Applied AI, Senior Software Engineers, Forward Deployed Engineers) to scale the technology platform and compliance infrastructure.
- **Expand product suite**: Roll out broader financial services for agents — payments, stablecoin rails, yield, risk, and clearing — as agent capabilities grow.
- **Build ecosystem**: Grow the Agent Commerce Kit and community standards for agent identity and commerce.

## Why Work Here
- **Cutting-edge mission**: Shape the financial infrastructure of the AI agent economy, working on a first-of-its-kind regulated bank for agents.
- **Strong team**: Co-founders who invented USDC and built Circle, plus a lean but elite team drawn from top fintech and Big Tech (Brex, Meta, PayPal, Airbnb, etc.).
- **Well-funded**: $48M from top-tier investors (a16z, General Catalyst, Coinbase Ventures) provides runway and stability for a high-risk, high-reward venture.
- **Remote-friendly**: Open roles are listed as "Remote - United States" (e.g., Head of Applied AI, Senior Software Engineer).
- **Culture**: Emphasis on building foundational technology (open-source ACK, regulatory compliance, agent infrastructure) with a policy-first, safety-conscious mindset — appealing to engineers who care about responsible AI.
- **Growth trajectory**: Small team (11-50 employees) with explosive headcount growth and market attention, offering early employees outsized impact and career acceleration.

## Sources
1. [catena.com - About](https://catena.com/about)
2. [linkedin.com - Catena Company Profile](https://www.linkedin.com/company/catenalabs)
3. [catena.com - Founding Announcement](https://catena.com/blog/announcing-catena-labs)
4. [catena.com - Platform & Series A Announcement](https://catena.com/blog/banking-governance-platform-for-ai-agents-open)
5. [ashbyhq.com - Careers Page](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/catena)

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