Forward Deployed Engineer

Heidi•San Francisco, CA

9d•$160,000 - $220,000•Onsite

About The Position

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll be embedded with our most strategic customers — the person who makes Heidi actually work in the real world. You'll own the full technical lifecycle from first deployment through to a thriving, self-sufficient customer: standing up integrations, building custom clinical workflows, debugging production issues, and becoming a trusted technical partner to the clinicians and IT teams you work with. You're not handing off to someone else — you're seeing it through. You'll work closely with Product and Engineering to surface what customers actually need, acting as the field intelligence that shapes the roadmap.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience: You have a track record of shipping production systems that real users depend on.
Strong full-stack or product engineering fundamentals: You have enough backend, integration, and operational depth to reason through messy customer environments.
Good product judgment: You can separate the stated request from the real problem, ask sharp questions, and make practical trade-offs without hiding behind process.
Strong implementation discipline: You write readable, testable code, keep scope tight, and avoid building broad abstractions before the problem has earned them.
Comfort with ambiguity and customer proximity: You can sit with clinicians, operators, IT teams, and commercial stakeholders, understand their constraints, and turn fuzzy workflow pain into a concrete technical path.
Strong systems thinking: You can see both the local deployment need and the broader product pattern, and you know how to build in a way that preserves optionality without over-engineering.
Operational ownership: You care what happens after go-live. You think about monitoring, supportability, failure recovery, rollout risk, and long-tail maintenance before declaring something shipped.
Collaborative working style: You work well in a tight feedback loop with product, deployment, sales, and engineering. You are comfortable sharing work in progress, pairing on hard problems, and pressure-testing decisions early.
Technical communication: You can explain trade-offs clearly to customer IT teams, clinical leaders, and internal engineering teams without hand-waving or hiding important constraints.
Fluency with AI coding tools: You use modern AI tools to accelerate delivery, while staying rigorous about correctness, security, validation, and maintainability.

Nice To Haves

Healthcare integrations, EHR workflows, event-driven systems, workflow orchestration, agentic systems, or complex enterprise deployments.

Responsibilities

Build systems in real clinical environments: You’ll work close to customers where Heidi’s product meets the messy reality of healthcare operations, EHR constraints, security requirements, specialty workflows, and implementation deadlines. The goal is to understand what is actually happening in the workflow and turn that into software that works.
Ship customer-specific workflow solutions with product discipline: You’ll build the configuration, integrations, workflow logic, and product extensions needed to make Heidi successful in important customer environments. You’ll be expected to move quickly while keeping a clear eye on what should become reusable over time.
Turn field learning into product leverage: The best output of this role is not just a successful deployment. It is a sharper product. You’ll bring back high-signal evidence about where customers repeatedly need the same capability, where our platform needs to become stronger, and where field-built solutions should graduate into reusable product or platform primitives.
Own the technical reality of deployments: You’ll work with customer IT, security, operations, and clinical stakeholders to understand constraints, design a workable implementation path, and ship the system. That includes integration details, failure modes, observability, support handoff, and the operational shape of what happens after go-live.
Build for trust in clinical workflows: These systems sit inside real healthcare operations. You’ll write clean, testable code with clear interfaces, thoughtful error handling, auditability, and enough observability that failures can be understood and recovered from.
Work tightly with product, deployment, and platform teams: You’ll operate in a close loop with deployment strategists, clinical specialists, product engineering, and platform teams. The role requires strong independent judgment, but not solo heroics. You should be comfortable shaping the problem with others before and during implementation.
Compose from Heidi’s existing capabilities: You’ll use the product and platform primitives we already have wherever possible, and build new pieces when the existing system genuinely does not cover the job. When new patterns emerge repeatedly, you’ll help turn that learning into the next layer of the product.
Help define the FDE function: As an early hire, you’ll help set the bar for how forward deployed engineering works at Heidi: how we build, how we maintain what we ship, how we learn from deployments, and how field work compounds into a stronger product over time.