Forward Deployed Engineer

OpenLoop Health•Des Moines, IA

3d•Remote

About The Position

Forward Deployed Engineering is how we build that platform with real clients instead of guessing. An FDE embeds with a client, works in the client's own codebase, and builds their integration against OpenLoop's production API. Whatever the client needs that the platform cannot do yet is filed as a platform gap and built once, centrally, so every client inherits it. The work product of an FDE is not the client's integration; it is the reusable asset that client forced into existence: a recipe others start from, an executable check behind every claim in our docs, a client manifest that makes the impact of any platform change computable, and the SDKs, agents and tooling that make the next deployment faster than the last. You will write production code in two places, the client's system and ours. You will take an ask that is vague or over-promised and turn it into a scope you can defend. You will tell a client, and our own sales team, when something should not be committed to. And you will leave every deployment better instrumented than you found it, so the next client needs less of us than the last one did. We are hiring for this role at the Senior, Staff and Senior Staff levels. Apply once; we will calibrate level during the process based on the scope you have carried, not on years alone. The section below describes what changes as scope grows.

Requirements

5 to 15+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time delivering directly for external customers or partners, in their environments, not only internal roadmap work. We are filling roles across this range; depth of ownership matters more to us than the number.
End-to-end ownership of complex, customer-facing technical delivery: you can name the deployments you ran, what went wrong, and what you did about it after launch.
Strong integration engineering depth: API design and consumption, auth, webhooks versus polling, idempotency, rate limits, pagination, schema drift, reconciliation, and comfort across the stack from APIs to data to cloud infrastructure.
You build with AI agents every day and can show how you verify what they produce, when you stop trusting them, and how you evaluate an LLM-based system before it reaches a customer.
Experience handling sensitive data with a security-first mindset, treating compliance constraints as design inputs rather than follow-ups.
Excellent communication with technical and non-technical audiences, including delivering unwelcome news to a customer early and keeping the relationship.
Demonstrated judgment about scope: you can point to things you descoped, sequenced or declined, and explain why.
Evidence of leverage beyond your own delivery: SDKs, tooling, checks, reference implementations or practices you built that made other people's work faster. The scale of that leverage is part of how we calibrate level.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience in healthcare or another regulated domain where a mistake has consequences beyond a rollback.
Practical experience shipping LLM-based or agentic systems to production, including how you measured quality and what you did when the model was confidently wrong.
Experience building developer platforms: SDKs, CLIs, API conventions, documentation that is tested rather than written.
Familiarity with EHR, scheduling, pharmacy or payments integrations; FHIR is a plus.
Experience working alongside sales or solutions teams in pre-sales technical conversations without becoming a blocker.

Responsibilities

Build for clients, in their codebase, against our API. Embed with a client's engineering team and stand up their integration on OpenLoop's Partner API: their app, their data, their identity, their legacy systems. Own the outcome through go-live and the weeks after it.
Never wire around the platform: where the API falls short, file the gap with the endpoint it stands in for, and leave a dated, time-boxed workaround at most.
Build with AI in the loop, for clients and for us. Ship the systems that let a client build on us with AI in the loop: SDKs and reference implementations, a CLI and machine-readable docs a client can hand to their own coding agent, and agentic workflows on our API such as intake, routing, support and refill journeys, with human review by design, evaluations before launch and monitoring after.
Run deployments on the agent roster, and make it better. Use and extend the agents that run our deployments: the tenant readiness gate, conformance checks against a live tenant, seeding checkers, docs-freshness and superseding drafts, gap filing, client communication drafts. Every agent output is a draft a human approves, and you are accountable for knowing when the agent is wrong.
Turn one client's need into every client's capability. Contribute additive recipes and checks to the shared cookbook, keep client manifests current, and bring the evidence that moves a recurring workaround into the platform roadmap instead of into another workaround. The measure is how much less of us the next client needs.
Turn ambiguity into a plan. Take a client ask that is vague, over-promised or self-contradictory and produce a phased, defensible scope, with a clear statement of what we are not doing and what the API does not do yet.
Never undo prior work. Checks lock the claims we publish; manifests tell you who depends on what; edits are additive or explicitly superseding with a compatibility window. A change that would break a live client stops and becomes a proposal, not a merge.
Hold the line, internally and externally. Be the credible technical voice with client engineering and with our own go-to-market team: what we cannot do, what we should not do, and what will not fit the timeline are three different answers, and all three are better delivered early.
Raise the bar around you. Share what a deployment taught you, review other people's integration designs, and help write the playbook for a team that is being built now.