Forward Deployed Engineer

Joyful Health•New York City, NY

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

Joyful Health is hiring one of its first Forward Deployed Engineers to build out the function. The role sits between the company’s largest customers and its product, crafting agent workflows to meet the real-world needs of healthcare practices. The engineer will embed with practices and revenue cycle teams to understand their operations and build agent workflows, data integrations, and custom tools on Joyful’s platform. This is an engineering role with a commercial edge. The Forward Deployed Engineer will ship production code, lead customer working sessions, help grow accounts, and turn field insights into product improvements. As a founding team member in this function, the engineer will also establish onboarding approaches, reusable patterns, deployment playbooks, success metrics, internal tooling, and eventually contribute to growing the team.

Requirements

Passion for Joyful Health’s mission and interest in solving pressing problems for healthcare providers.
Empathy for users and a desire to build with their needs in mind.
At least 3 years of full-time engineering experience in software, AI, or data engineering.
Experience moving toward customer-facing engineering work, such as in a Forward Deployed Engineer, solutions engineer, deployment engineer, or similar role.
Strong technical execution and fluency in Python and SQL.
Comfort working across backend systems, data pipelines, and APIs.
Experience integrating with messy third-party systems.
Hands-on experience building with LLMs and agents, including translating business rules into agent logic and debugging agent errors.
Commercial judgment: ability to identify the business problem behind a feature request, scope work around meaningful outcomes, and explain technical trade-offs to both practice owners and engineers.
A strong sense of ownership, demonstrated growth in scope and responsibility, comfort with ambiguity, and ability to turn customer conversations into plans and working prototypes.
Low ego, a growth mindset, and interest in shaping an early engineering team and its culture.
A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience as a founder or early engineer at a startup.
Experience with healthcare data, revenue cycle management, or payer workflows.
Experience making messy real-world data usable.

Responsibilities

Own customer deployments end to end, from signed contract through a live, measurable result.
Connect each practice’s data to Joyful, encode payer rules and workflows into agent behavior, and tune the agent as results come in.
Direct the agent and quickly build account-specific solutions, including agent logic, analyses, automations, and dashboards.
Work with engineering to incorporate successful account-specific solutions into the core platform.
Run working sessions with customer revenue cycle teams, map workflows, identify revenue leakage, and develop scoped plans with clear outcomes.
Create standard operating procedures and work with revenue cycle specialists to translate account learnings into improved agent behavior.
Partner with the account team on renewals and expansion, using results and insights to demonstrate customer value.
Build trusted relationships with customers and represent their needs within Joyful.
Turn field insights into problem statements, specifications, and roadmap input.
Develop the Forward Deployed Engineering function, including deployment playbooks, reusable patterns, internal tooling, and success metrics, and help grow the team over time.