Forward Deployed Engineer

Vitalize•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

At Vitalize, we’re building toward a future where hospital operations are safe, autonomous, fair, and cost-effective. Today, hospitals still run their most critical workflows (staffing, labor planning, capacity management) on spreadsheets, paper, and gut instinct. This creates massive waste, burnout, and poor patient outcomes. Vitalize replaces this with an intelligent operating system for the hospital workforce. We bring real-time decision support to clinical leaders, eliminate manual work, reduce unnecessary labor spend, and unlock patient capacity across health systems. We are a team of Stanford, Cambridge, and Columbia dropouts, former math champs, and repeat founders. We’re live across 20+ hospitals, approaching eight figures in revenue, and backed by top investors. We’ve 3x’ed revenue in the last 3 months, and are scaling fast. This is a chance to build foundational infrastructure for healthcare at a moment of real momentum. Role Overview We’re hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to work at the front lines of Vitalize’s largest and most complex enterprise deployments. This role is designed for engineer operators who want real responsibility, customer exposure, and technical ownership from day one. You’ll embed directly with large, seven-figure health system customers, developing a rare expertise at the intersection of engineering, enterprise software, and healthcare operations. You’ll spend meaningful time on-site, deeply understanding how hospitals operate, how our product performs under pressure, and where the gaps are. You’ll ship fixes, influence product direction, and help shape how Vitalize scales across enterprise customers. This is a high-visibility role with real impact. You will become one of the people who knows our customers best.

Requirements

2+ years of experience in a software engineering or highly technical role.
Comfort working across the stack, or the curiosity and ability to learn quickly.
Strong communication skills. You can explain technical issues clearly to engineers, operators, and clinical leaders.
Willingness to travel ~50% and spend extended time on-site with customers.
Bias toward ownership and action. You don’t wait to be told what to fix.

Nice To Haves

Engineers who want to learn fast by being closest to real users.
People who enjoy pressure, ambiguity, and high-stakes environments.
Builders who take pride in making systems work in the real world, not just in theory.
Ex-founders or future founders.

Responsibilities

Embed with enterprise customers (≈50% travel)
Travel regularly to customer sites and work on-site with health system partners during deployments and critical phases.
Build trust with clinical leaders, including CNOs and executive stakeholders, by deeply understanding their workflows and constraints.
Support and unblock deployments
Partner closely with Deployment Strategists to ensure smooth go-lives and successful adoption.
Debug issues in real time, identify root causes, and unblock customers quickly.
Ship fixes and improvements
Ship real code that immediately affects live hospital operations
Make targeted improvements to product behavior, configurations, or integrations while embedded with customers.
Translate customer reality into product signal
Collect structured feedback from real usage, not just feature requests.
Turn on-the-ground insights into clear product and engineering requirements for the core team.
Become a domain expert
Develop a deep understanding of hospital operations, staffing workflows, and labor constraints.
Serve as an internal expert on how our largest customers actually use Vitalize in production.