The posting
ABOUT OPENLOOP
OpenLoop was co-founded by CEO, Dr. Jon Lensing, and COO, Christian Williams, with the vision to bring care anywhere. Our telehealth support solutions are thoughtfully designed to streamline and simplify go-to-market care delivery for companies offering meaningful virtual support to patients across an expansive array of specialties, in all 50 states.
ABOUT THE ROLE
OpenLoop is the clinical and operational infrastructure that digital-health brands, clinics and employers use to run virtual care across all 50 states. Our clients put their brand on the front end; everything behind it runs on us: clinicians, intake, scheduling, charting, pharmacy and fulfillment, payments and licensing. Clients reach that infrastructure through one client platform, from a no-code storefront to a full Partner API, and our job is to make it effortless for them to adopt.
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.
As a Staff Forward Deployed Engineer you take the deployments nobody else can, and you set the pattern the rest of the team runs. You are the technical architect of a pod: you own the client manifest, decide what is bespoke and what generalizes, are the one voice to our platform teams on API behaviour, and build the AI-native tooling that lets one engineer carry two clients. You write production code in two places, the client's system and ours, and you tell our own sales team when a commitment should not be made.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- 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 AI SDKs and agentic solutions for clients. Design and ship the backend and frontend 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 (intake, routing, support and refill journeys) with human review by design, evaluations before launch and monitoring after.
- Architect and own the AI-assisted way FDE works. Own the agent roster that runs our deployments: the tenant readiness gate, the 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; you decide where the human sits and how you know the agent is right.
- Build the systems that improve OpenLoop's API for everyone. Turn what one client needed into what every client gets: additive recipes and checks on the shared cookbook, client manifests and impact analysis, API conventions for how domain teams expose capabilities to clients, and the evidence that moves a recurring workaround into the platform roadmap. The measure is how much less of us the next client needs.
- Turn ambiguity into a plan. Take a client ask that is 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. Be the credible technical voice with client engineering leadership and internally: what we cannot do, what we should not do, and what will not fit the timeline are three different answers.
- Raise the bar. Mentor FDEs and deployment strategists, calibrate how deployments are run, and help write the playbook for a team that is being built now.
WHO YOU ARE
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time delivering directly for external customers or partners, in their environments, not only internal roadmap work.
- Proven end-to-end ownership of complex, customer-facing technical deliveries: 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.
Preferred
- 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.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
How You Work
OpenLoop's values are prescriptive, and this role tests all of them:
- Disciplined Intensity: effective under real deadline pressure, and you build systems instead of becoming the only person who can fix things.
- Do No Harm: patient safety and data integrity come first, and you know when to slow down to do it right.
- Step In, Stay In: your ownership travels to the outcome, not to the handoff.
- Purposeful Speed: you ship fast without leaving behind something only you can maintain.
- Clarity Over Comfort: you say the thing, explain the why, and invite disagreement.
Core collaboration hours are CST 8am to 5pm, with client-facing work occasionally requiring flexibility outside them. Remote within the United States; periodic travel to clients and to team working sessions.
OUR BENEFITS
In addition, for salaried positions you would also be eligible for:
- Medical, Dental, and Vision plans
- Flexible Spending/Health Savings Accounts
- Flexible PTO
- 401(k) + Company Match
- Life Insurance, Pet insurance, and more
OUR COMPANY
We have a relatively flat organizational structure here at OpenLoop. Everyone is encouraged to bring ideas to the table and make things happen. This fits in well with our core values of Autonomy, Competence and Belonging, as we want everyone to feel empowered and supported to do their best work.
Sound like a good fit? We’d love to meet you.
