Forward Deployed Engineer

Upperline Health•Nashville, TN

38d•Hybrid

About The Position

Upperline Health is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed directly with our partner organizations, building and adapting technology solutions in the field so that Upperline's platform delivers real value inside partner practices as we scale our specialty value-based care model. You will work on-site and remotely alongside a few partners and their CTOs and technology teams, as well as the operations leaders, to understand workflow gaps first hand and then rapidly build, configure, and iterate on the solutions that close them — from data feeds and EMR integrations to patient-facing experiences and custom applications. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer delivery, translating what is happening on the ground into working software and data connectivity, often within days rather than a traditional multi-sprint cycle. This work happens across organizational boundaries. You will earn technical credibility with people who do not report to Upperline, navigate partner security and vendor review, and make architectural decisions you can defend to two engineering teams at once. The right individual will thrive in ambiguous environments, enjoy building alongside customers, and will want to help define an emerging function within a high-growth healthcare technology business. This is not a solutions architecture role and it is not implementation consulting. You will design it, build it, ship it, and remain accountable for whether it gets used.

Requirements

6+ years of professional experience spanning software engineering and customer-facing delivery, with a demonstrated ability to build and ship working solutions independently and end to end
Real depth somewhere in the stack, with working competence across data, backend, and frontend
Direct experience integrating with systems you do not control — underdocumented vendor APIs, legacy interfaces, and data you have to negotiate for
Fluency with SQL and a modern data stack, with comfort owning a pipeline end to end
Demonstrated ability to influence executive stakeholders outside your own organization, and to work directly with non-technical, front-line users to gather requirements and validate solutions in real time
Analytical rigor in framing ambiguous business problems, and the judgment to know which problem is worth solving first
Judgment about protected health information as an engineering constraint rather than a compliance checkbox: minimum necessary, audit logging, de-identified test data, and what does and does not belong in a development environment
Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-changing environments with minimal formal specification, and a bias toward rapid, hands-on iteration over lengthy planning cycles
Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to clinical, operational, and executive audiences
Willingness and ability to travel to partner sites as needed (estimated 25-40%)
Strong understanding of and compliance with HIPAA privacy requirements

Nice To Haves

Healthcare delivery experience, particularly in specialty care or value-based care
Hands-on work with a specific EMR (Athenahealth, Epic, eClinicalWorks, ModMed)
Healthcare data standards and EDI transaction sets (837, 835, 270/271)
Prior forward-deployed, field engineering, professional services, or founding-engineer experience
Experience in strategy consulting or a similarly analytical, client-facing environment
Care management, care coordination, or risk-based contract programs
Microsoft Azure

Responsibilities

Establish the data relationship with each partner: what Upperline needs, where it lives, how it reaches us, and how it stays current
Build and operate the interfaces that make it real — EMR feeds (HL7v2 ADT/ORU, FHIR, CCDA), eligibility and claims data, and the SFTP and flat-file realities that still run much of healthcare
Solve patient identity and matching across systems that were never designed to agree with each other
Connect Upperline's platform to the partner's environment: identity and single sign-on, scheduling, clinical documentation, messaging, and reporting
Decide what integrates, what gets replaced, and what runs in parallel, and defend the decision to both engineering organizations
Partner with Upperline's Data & Analytics and Engineering teams so partner-built solutions align with broader technical architecture and data standards
Extend and customize Upperline applications to fit partner workflows, and build new interfaces or tooling where the gap is real
Write production-quality code across the stack in a regulated, patient-facing environment
Build for both audiences: patient experiences that work for an older and often less digitally native population, and provider workflows that do not add a single unnecessary click
Travel to partner locations to gather requirements, deploy solutions, and provide direct support through critical rollouts
Spend time in partner clinics — observe intake, rooming, and check-out; talk with the patients receiving Upperline communications and the providers working in the chart
Support go-live and adoption, including hands-on training and troubleshooting with partner staff and end users
Serve as the primary technical point of contact for partner leadership and partner technology teams
Monitor performance and adoption after launch, and iterate on, or retire, solutions that are not delivering value
Help define an emerging function: build the playbooks, patterns, and reusable assets that make the second and third partner deployment faster than the first
Exercise judgment about what should remain partner-specific and what should become a configurable capability in Upperline's core platform, then make that case to Product and Engineering
Document solutions and hand off recurring or scaled tools to core Engineering and Product teams for long-term ownership
Contribute learnings from the field back into Upperline's broader product and engineering roadmap
Partner with Product and Value Based Care teams so partner solutions support broader program and risk-based contract goals
Communicate progress, blockers, and outcomes clearly to technical, clinical, operational, and executive audiences at both Upperline and the partner