Senior Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

OpenLoop Health•Des Moines, IA

About The Position

OpenLoop builds telehealth support solutions that help companies deliver virtual care across specialties and all 50 states. Forward Deployed Engineering embeds with clients, works in their codebases, and builds integrations with OpenLoop’s production API. Platform gaps identified during client work are developed centrally as reusable capabilities for all clients. The Senior Engineering Manager owns the Forward Deployed Engineering team and is accountable for clients going live with a clean handoff and for improving the team’s performance over time. This is a coaching-first player-coach role: the manager stays technical through design and code review, platform-gap decisions, and collaboration with client engineering and platform teams, rather than personally owning a client deployment or focusing on writing code. The role reports into Engineering and works daily with platform, implementation, customer success, and sales.

Requirements

At least 8 years of software engineering experience.
At least 3 years of experience managing engineers, including hiring, performance management, leveling and promotions, and team growth.
Experience leading teams that deliver in customers’ environments, with the ability to discuss unsuccessful deployments and resulting changes.
Experience running a customer migration or re-platforming program where customers could decline the change.
Experience allocating a team’s capacity when demand exceeds supply.
Strong technical knowledge of integrations, including APIs, authentication, webhooks versus polling, idempotency, schema drift, and reconciliation.
Ability to review and change technical designs through effective questions.
Experience building with AI agents and a perspective on human-in-the-loop design, evaluation, and handling confident errors.
Security-first approach to sensitive data and ability to treat compliance as a design input.
Experience telling customers or sales stakeholders that a request cannot be done or will not fit a timeline while maintaining the relationship.
Ability to identify work that was descoped and explain why.
Demonstrated impact beyond one’s own team through tooling, practices, or platform changes.

Nice To Haves

Experience in healthcare or another regulated domain.
Experience with EHR, scheduling, pharmacy, or payments integrations; FHIR experience is a plus.
Experience managing managers, leading teams through organizational change, or scaling an FDE, solutions engineering, or professional services function.
Developer platform experience, including SDKs, CLIs, API conventions, or tested documentation.
Comfort with pre-sales technical conversations.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

Own client outcomes across the portfolio, ensuring each client in build has a named owner and go-live date, and proactively report troubled deployments with dates, impacts, and trade-offs.
Allocate capacity by assigning new clients when they arrive, identifying what work they displace, and prioritizing client, migration, and platform work.
Lead deployment pods through their technical architects, giving them clear ownership and decision rights and encouraging early escalation.
Migrate existing clients to the Partner API in cohorts with implementation, platform engineering, and client teams; respect change calendars and measure each migration by its first production patient.
Manage the interface with platform teams by identifying the capability represented by each gap, deciding who will build it, and escalating stalled reviews with a date.
Ensure each go-live has a documented, signed-off exit from hypercare on a set date.
Hire and develop FDEs and Deployment Strategists at every level; coach employees, address performance issues promptly, defend leveling decisions, and run review processes with no surprises.
Own adoption and measurement of the deployment agent roster, including readiness, conformance, seeding, documentation, gap filing, and client communications, while ensuring a human approves every output.
Protect platform discipline: do not work around the platform; make changes additive or explicitly superseding, and treat changes that could break a live client as proposals rather than merges.
Partner with go-to-market teams before commitments are made, clarify what is not possible or not feasible within a timeline, and turn prioritized client needs into a dated plan.
Document and scale deployment practices into a team playbook so deployments rely less on the manager.
Review integration designs, adjudicate platform gaps, and maintain technical credibility with client engineering leaders and platform engineers.