Senior Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

OpenLoop Health•Des Moines, IA

19h

About The Position

The Senior Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering, owns the Forward Deployed Engineering team and its client outcomes. The team embeds with clients, works in their codebases, and builds integrations against OpenLoop’s production API. Platform gaps identified during client work are built centrally as reusable capabilities so all clients can benefit. The role is measured by clients going live with clean handoffs and by continual improvement of the team. It is a coaching-first player-coach role: the manager stays technical through design and code review rather than owning a client deployment or focusing on individual coding. The role reports into Engineering and works daily with platform, implementation, customer success, and sales. The manager oversees client deployment ownership and dates, capacity allocation, technical leadership through pod architects, migrations to the Partner API, coordination with platform teams, and documented transitions out of hypercare. They hire and develop FDEs and Deployment Strategists, oversee the team’s agent roster and human review practices, protect platform and compatibility standards, partner with go-to-market teams on commitments, and establish a repeatable deployment playbook.

Requirements

8+ years of experience in software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers, with experience in hiring, performance management, leveling, promotions, and team growth.
Experience leading teams delivering in customer environments and ability to discuss failed deployments and the changes made as a result.
Experience running a customer migration or re-platforming program where customers could decline, and allocating a team against demand that exceeded capacity.
Strong technical depth in integrations, including APIs, authentication, webhooks versus polling, idempotency, schema drift, and reconciliation.
Ability to review integration designs and identify or change design direction through technical judgment.
Experience building with AI agents and a point of view 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 that a request cannot be done or will not fit a timeline while maintaining the relationship, and ability to explain scope descoped and why.
Demonstrated impact beyond one's own team through tooling, practices, or platform changes.

Nice To Haves

Healthcare or other regulated-domain experience.
Experience with EHR, scheduling, pharmacy, or payments integrations; FHIR 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.
BS 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 reporting deployment risks, impacts, and trade-offs.
Allocate team capacity when new client work arrives, making ownership and displaced work explicit when client, migration, and platform priorities compete.
Lead deployment pods through their FDE technical architects, establishing clear ownership, decision rights, and early escalation practices.
Lead migrations of existing clients to the Partner API in cohorts with implementation, platform engineering, and client teams, respecting change calendars and measuring each migration by its first production patient.
Manage the interface with platform teams: identify the capability represented by each platform gap, decide who will build it, and escalate stalled reviews with a date.
Ensure every go-live has a defined, documented, and signed-off exit from hypercare.
Hire and develop FDEs and Deployment Strategists at every level; coach for scope, address performance matters promptly, defend leveling decisions, and run review processes without surprises.
Own adoption and measurement of deployment agents used for readiness, conformance, seeding, documentation, gap filing, and client communications, ensuring a human approves every output.
Protect engineering discipline by avoiding workarounds to the platform, making changes additive or explicitly superseding, and treating changes that could break a live client as proposals rather than merges.
Partner with go-to-market teams before commitments are made, clarify feasibility and timing, and turn prioritized client work into a dated plan.
Create a deployment playbook that codifies effective practices and reduces the support required from the manager for each new deployment.