You have to do class { 'sensu': ... }
before the sensu::backend and/or sensu::agent classes. If you want to include both profiles on the same host then I’d advise a 3rd profile called something like profile::sensu::common
and define sensu class there and include that profile in both agent and backend profiles. In Puppet a class {}
done before an include is fine but an include first will cause duplicate declaration errors.