Forward Deployed Engineer

Build the infrastructure that keeps grandma home.

Home care runs the way it has for forty years - manually, by humans, on phone calls. Every referral fielded by a coordinator on the other line. Every shift filled by a scheduler with a spreadsheet. Behind every missed call is a discharge planner who hangs up and dials the next agency. Behind every unfilled shift is an 82-year-old who didn't get her bath.

By 2030, 80 million Americans will be over 65. The largest home care agencies in the country are betting they can answer that demand by deploying AI agents across hundreds of branches. Zingage is the operating layer underneath their intake, scheduling, care coordination, compliance, and patient engagement.

The gap we're filling

Home care runs on people doing the hardest job in any industry - scheduling, coordinating, covering, fielding calls at 2am - without software that was ever built for them.

We've done the job. Our team has worked the shifts, taken the calls, and logged the late nights that schedulers live through every day. We didn't study this problem from the outside. We built from inside it.

That's why it works.

Who we are

Strong opinions. High bar. No interest in doing things the easy way when there's a better one.

Engineering at Ramp and Datadog. Trading infrastructure at Citadel. Product and operations at Reddit, Uber, and Crowdstrike. Early teams at healthcare AI companies, Tandem & Tennr. Former founders who've built and sold companies before this one.

How we work

We run on four values. Not aspirations - expectations.

• Customer first. The patient, the caregiver, the agency. When a decision requires a tradeoff, their experience wins.
• High velocity. Speed and direction. We move fast because patients are waiting. We pause when direction is unclear - shipping the wrong thing fast is slower than getting it right.
• Extreme ownership. Own the outcome, not just your tasks. Drive the result. Escalate when blocked. Accept the accountability.
• Care. About your craft, your teammates, and the families depending on what you build. The discipline to give hard feedback, refuse to ship something broken, and notice when someone is struggling.

About the role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Zingage, you are the technical half of a two-person deployment unit. Every account has one FDE and one Deployment Strategist - the pair is the unit. The Deployment Strategist owns the relationship: executive communications, rollout strategy, change management, and business outcomes. You own the engineering: agent configuration, EMR integration, scenario builds, and the custom tooling that makes a home care agency run differently on Monday than it did on Friday. You're co-presenting, co-solving, and jointly accountable. Neither role works without the other.

You are first and foremost an engineer. You're also a translator: between what the customer says they need and what actually needs to be built, between messy operational data and the metric that matters, between a field observation and a product improvement. You build the integration. The deployment is the proof of concept. The proof of concept closes the next deal.

You stay paired to the account for the lifetime of the deal. As a deployment matures, you may take on new accounts alongside it - but the system you built and the customer who runs it remain yours. When they expand to new branches or new workflows, you're the engineer who already knows how the agency works.

Deployment is the most strategically important function at Zingage. Every expansion we close, every referral that opens the next account, traces back to what happened in deployment. The integrations you build, the things that surface at 2am - that's the product roadmap.

Strong performance here is the direct path to FDE Lead as the team scales. You'll report to Deployment/Product Leadership.

What you'll do

• Translate customer workflows into working deployments - and improve them. Sit with coordinators and schedulers. Understand how work actually flows. Then push back on what's broken. Your job isn't to automate the legacy process - it's to figure out the right workflow and build that
• Build integrations with home care EMR and scheduling systems. When the API covers it, use it. When it doesn't, you build around it
• Investigate customer data to find the right lever - not just what's broken, but what's the highest-leverage thing to fix
• Build AI workflows that hold up in production. The bar is a workflow running Monday morning when no one from Zingage is in the room
• File field briefs that improve the product. When you see the same problem three times, it's a platform gap. Write it up clearly enough that Product can act on it - and follow through until it ships
• Use AI fluently - in your code, your debugging, your process. You're building AI agents for customers; you should be running them yourself. We'll ask how during the interview
• Make trade-offs under pressure. Every deployment requires judgment calls between scope, speed, and stability. You make them in the field without waiting for permission

What we're looking for

Four things. In order.

1. Engineering ability. You write real code. You own a build end-to-end - script, integration, debug, ship. Background can be software engineering, solutions engineering, or technical consulting. What matters: you don't need someone else to get it across the line.
2. Data sensitivity. You look at a customer's operational data and ask the right questions. Not what's the number - what does it depend on, and what's the right lever. Common sense applied to messy systems.
3. Product instinct. What you learn in the field makes the platform better for the next ten customers. The FDE who runs a good deployment and files nothing is costing us.
4. Customer presence. You're in the room with agency owners, administrators, and operations leads on every deployment. You earn trust with a frontline scheduler and present technical findings to a C-suite in the same day. You're also in the room during go-live - you notice when a workflow isn't landing with staff, and you adapt before it becomes a problem.

Also: 2-5 years in a customer-facing technical role. TypeScript or Python; SQL required. You're joining a function being built in real time - no inherited playbook.

Tech stack

TypeScript, Python, SQL - production proficiency in at least two required. We integrate deeply with systems that don't always cooperate; comfort building custom integrations beyond standard APIs matters.

Levels

Forward Deployed Engineer - 2-5 years. Mid-market and standard enterprise accounts. Owns full deployment build; senior engineering available for platform architecture. Field briefs and product feedback. Path to Senior FDE.

Senior Forward Deployed Engineer - 5+ years. Most complex and largest enterprise accounts. Owns full deployment build; is the senior technical resource on the account. Mentors FDEs, shapes technical standards, contributes to pre-sale scoping. Path to FDE Lead.

The process

1. Intro Call - 30 min. First filter: customer presence, role clarity, fit
2. Live Technical Screen - Two back-to-back exercises: an integration challenge and a data exercise using real customer context. No take-home - we move fast
3. On-site - Present your technical exercise as if presenting findings to a customer's operations lead. Panel debrief follows. Strong candidates receive an offer the same day

What we offer

• Competitive base and equity (see above)
• Equipment stipend - use what you need to do your best work
• Luxury gym membership in NYC
• Daily lunch. Dinner for the late night work jams.
• Time off as needed - we care about output, not hours
• Happy hours, poker nights, and builder events in our Soho office. We're regulars at Manjul Coffee & Toad Hall.
• Snacks in office - few favorites include Gruns gummies, sardines, protein bars. also, midday froyo runs!

Apply

Our promise: real ownership, hard problems, and work that ends up in someone's home. If that's what you're looking for, let's talk: View email address on click.appcast.io