Business Operations Analyst

About 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.

Responsibilities

• Sourcing and outreach: Identify and source candidates from MBB firms, Big 4 consultancies, Palantir, and AI-native companies, and develop new sources as the existing ones are exhausted. Write and run outbound campaigns over LinkedIn and email, owning the quality of that writing rather than sending templates someone else wrote. Test messaging variants against one another, measure reply and conversion rates, and discontinue approaches that do not perform.
• Screening: Conduct first-round conversations with candidates across both the Strategist and Forward Deployed Engineer tracks, assessing them against our rubrics for technical depth, client presence, and ownership. Improve those rubrics as you learn where they produce the wrong answer. Make screening recommendations and explain your reasoning to hiring managers, including when they initially disagree with your read.
• Hiring data: 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. Present those numbers in weekly hiring reviews and recommend specific changes based on what they show.
• Process and documentation: Maintain our compressed one-week interview loop as candidate volume increases. Document what works clearly enough that the next person we add to this team can execute it without your involvement. Identify points where the process slows down or produces inconsistent outcomes, and propose and implement fixes.
• Forward planning: Build candidate relationships for roles we expect to open in the next two quarters, not only for roles that are open today.

Career progression

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. 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. We will move you toward the hardest available problem rather than leaving you in a role you have already solved.

Requirements

• Between zero and two years of full-time experience. Recent graduates are encouraged to apply.
• You write clearly and persuasively; the majority of your first interactions with candidates will happen in writing, and the quality of that writing determines whether they respond at all.
• Comfortable being given an incomplete brief and working out the rest independently; you will ask for direction when you need it rather than stalling.
• Can build a funnel model in a spreadsheet without needing to be taught how, and are comfortable defending the assumptions behind it.
• Can sustain a high volume of conversations and frequent rejection, both from candidates who decline us and from candidates you have to decline.
• Genuine interest in AI and in what separates a strong engineer or strategist from an average one; you cannot accurately screen for capabilities you do not understand yourself.
• Will hold a defensible position when a more senior person disagrees with your assessment of a candidate, and will change your position when they give you a better argument.

What this role is not

• This is not a coordination role centered on scheduling and interview logistics.
• This is not a role with an established process waiting for you to execute. You will be building the process while the company is actively using it.
• This is not a remote role. Our team works from our New York office, and the screening work benefits substantially from proximity to the hiring managers you support.