Forward Deployed Engineer - AI Consultant

Proactive Technology Management•Detroit, MI

6d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is an embedded operator who bridges frontier AI methodology and production-grade operational reality within healthcare organizations. This role goes beyond traditional advisory work by leading a four-week AI Jumpstart Discovery cycle from kickoff to final readout. The FDE is responsible for delivering a prioritized opportunity portfolio, current-state and future-state process models, ROI calculations, and a 90-day execution plan that clients can fund and act upon. This is a high-agency role where the practitioner sits with healthcare executives, builds trust, and converts ambiguous operational pain into a concrete, fundable roadmap. The role involves up to 30% travel.

Requirements

Eight or more years in healthcare operations, healthcare consulting (Big 4, boutique, or in-house transformation), or healthcare-IT advisory.
Client-facing engagement leadership at the director, VP, or partner-track level, with a history of owning engagements.
Working knowledge of at least one major EHR ecosystem (Epic, Oracle Health / Cerner, Meditech, athenahealth) at the workflow level.
Track record of executive-ready deliverables under tight cycles.
Curiosity about applied AI in operational workflows; willingness to learn PTM's methodology deeply and apply it with discipline.
Fluency with tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Microsoft 365 Copilot at a deliberate-operator level expected within 90 days if not already possessed.
US work authorization.
Fluency in how healthcare operations actually run.
Experience leading work in two or more of the following areas: Hospital or health-system operations (admissions, scheduling, OR throughput, length of stay, transfers, capacity management), Revenue cycle (intake, eligibility and benefits, prior authorization, charge capture, coding, denials, AR follow-up, patient financial services), Clinical workflow and documentation (provider documentation burden, order management, clinical messaging, care coordination, post-acute handoffs), Payer operations (claims adjudication, utilization management, provider data, appeals), Healthcare IT advisory (EHR-adjacent integration, interoperability, HIE, HL7 / FHIR-aware workflow design).
Understanding of HIPAA, PHI handling, and the practical line between operational data and protected data.
Experience sitting across from a CMIO, a VP of Revenue Cycle, or a COO and earning the right to ask hard questions.
Ability to walk into a kickoff with twelve unfamiliar stakeholders and end the hour with their trust.
Ability to extract concrete cost implications from vague statements of frustration.
Ability to write a one-page, plain language executive summary with a clear recommendation.
Ability to respectfully and productively disagree with a senior client when their proposed pilot is the wrong starting point.
Ability to run a workshop where seven department heads with conflicting priorities reach a ranked list everyone can defend.
Ability to own scope and resolve ambiguity.
Accountability for engagement success if a roadmap is not shipped on day 30.

Nice To Haves

PE-portfolio company exposure or experience working with operating partners.
Familiarity with BPMN, Lean, Six Sigma, or a comparable process-modeling discipline.
Prior experience with discovery- or assessment-driven sales motions.

Responsibilities

Embed inside client operations for the duration of a Discovery engagement.
Lead structured interviews and facilitate workshops.
Direct PTM's four-agent transcript-to-roadmap pipeline.
Quality-assure every deliverable that goes to the client.
Own the client relationship from kickoff through Statement of Work for the implementation phase.
Run the 30-day AI Jumpstart Discovery cycle: kickoff, eight to fifteen department-level event-storming interviews, AI-assisted analysis, executive prioritization workshop, and final readout.
Apply a pain-first discovery method, surfacing drudgery, manual handoffs, bottlenecks, and broken approvals before any tool conversation.
Facilitate executive prioritization workshops to resolve a portfolio of 15 to 30 candidates into a ranked Top 5 (three quick wins, two strategic bets), each defensible with math.
Co-design current-state and future-state BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) maps with department owners, applying the Digital Assembly Line model to identify where AI, document understanding, and programmatic automation can replace manual toil.
Translate findings into ROI projections acceptable to a CFO, focusing on metrics like labor reallocation, cycle-time reduction, denial-rate movement, throughput per FTE, audit exposure, and prior-auth turnaround.
Direct the four-agent deliverable pipeline that converts transcripts into client-ready artifacts (opportunity extraction → current/future BPMN → department reports → org-wide consolidation), setting quality standards and owning QA.
Address blockers to AI adoption in enterprise settings, including data readiness, integration complexity, change-management friction, HIPAA and PHI boundaries, and governance constructs.
Act as the feedback loop into PTM's Fusion methodology and tooling, updating interview guides, prompt libraries, BPMN style guides, and the healthcare-vertical playbook.
Carry the relationship from Discovery into the implementation Statement of Work, participating in scope development and maintaining continuity into the build phase.