Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer

Upperline also brings its technology platform to partner organizations. Making that platform work inside a partner's four walls, seamlessly, for their patients and their providers, is the focus of this role.

Upperline Health is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed directly with our partner organizations, building and adapting technology solutions in the field so that Upperline's platform delivers real value inside partner practices as we scale our specialty value-based care model.

You will work on-site and remotely alongside a few partners and their CTOs and technology teams, as well as the operations leaders, to understand workflow gaps first hand and then rapidly build, configure, and iterate on the solutions that close them — from data feeds and EMR integrations to patient-facing experiences and custom applications. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer delivery, translating what is happening on the ground into working software and data connectivity, often within days rather than a traditional multi-sprint cycle.

This work happens across organizational boundaries. You will earn technical credibility with people who do not report to Upperline, navigate partner security and vendor review, and make architectural decisions you can defend to two engineering teams at once. The right individual will thrive in ambiguous environments, enjoy building alongside customers, and will want to help define an emerging function within a high-growth healthcare technology business.

This is not a solutions architecture role and it is not implementation consulting. You will design it, build it, ship it, and remain accountable for whether it gets used.

What You'll Do

Data Procurement & Movement

• Establish the data relationship with each partner: what Upperline needs, where it lives, how it reaches us, and how it stays current
• Build and operate the interfaces that make it real — EMR feeds (HL7v2 ADT/ORU, FHIR, CCDA), eligibility and claims data, and the SFTP and flat-file realities that still run much of healthcare
• Solve patient identity and matching across systems that were never designed to agree with each other

Integration Across Two Technology Stacks

• Connect Upperline's platform to the partner's environment: identity and single sign-on, scheduling, clinical documentation, messaging, and reporting
• Decide what integrates, what gets replaced, and what runs in parallel, and defend the decision to both engineering organizations
• Partner with Upperline's Data & Analytics and Engineering teams so partner-built solutions align with broader technical architecture and data standards

Application Development & Customization

• Extend and customize Upperline applications to fit partner workflows, and build new interfaces or tooling where the gap is real
• Write production-quality code across the stack in a regulated, patient-facing environment
• Build for both audiences: patient experiences that work for an older and often less digitally native population, and provider workflows that do not add a single unnecessary click

Field Deployment & Adoption

• Travel to partner locations to gather requirements, deploy solutions, and provide direct support through critical rollouts
• Spend time in partner clinics — observe intake, rooming, and check-out; talk with the patients receiving Upperline communications and the providers working in the chart
• Support go-live and adoption, including hands-on training and troubleshooting with partner staff and end users
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact for partner leadership and partner technology teams
• Monitor performance and adoption after launch, and iterate on, or retire, solutions that are not delivering value

Defining the Function & Feeding the Product

• Help define an emerging function: build the playbooks, patterns, and reusable assets that make the second and third partner deployment faster than the first
• Exercise judgment about what should remain partner-specific and what should become a configurable capability in Upperline's core platform, then make that case to Product and Engineering
• Document solutions and hand off recurring or scaled tools to core Engineering and Product teams for long-term ownership
• Contribute learnings from the field back into Upperline's broader product and engineering roadmap
• Partner with Product and Value Based Care teams so partner solutions support broader program and risk-based contract goals
• Communicate progress, blockers, and outcomes clearly to technical, clinical, operational, and executive audiences at both Upperline and the partner

Qualifications of the Forward Deployed Engineer

• 6+ years of professional experience spanning software engineering and customer-facing delivery, with a demonstrated ability to build and ship working solutions independently and end to end
• Real depth somewhere in the stack, with working competence across data, backend, and frontend
• Direct experience integrating with systems you do not control — underdocumented vendor APIs, legacy interfaces, and data you have to negotiate for
• Fluency with SQL and a modern data stack, with comfort owning a pipeline end to end
• Demonstrated ability to influence executive stakeholders outside your own organization, and to work directly with non-technical, front-line users to gather requirements and validate solutions in real time
• Analytical rigor in framing ambiguous business problems, and the judgment to know which problem is worth solving first
• Judgment about protected health information as an engineering constraint rather than a compliance checkbox: minimum necessary, audit logging, de-identified test data, and what does and does not belong in a development environment
• Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-changing environments with minimal formal specification, and a bias toward rapid, hands-on iteration over lengthy planning cycles
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to clinical, operational, and executive audiences
• Willingness and ability to travel to partner sites as needed (estimated 25-40%)
• Strong understanding of and compliance with HIPAA privacy requirements

Helpful, Not Required

• Healthcare delivery experience, particularly in specialty care or value-based care
• Hands-on work with a specific EMR (Athenahealth, Epic, eClinicalWorks, ModMed)
• Healthcare data standards and EDI transaction sets (837, 835, 270/271)
• Prior forward-deployed, field engineering, professional services, or founding-engineer experience
• Experience in strategy consulting or a similarly analytical, client-facing environment
• Care management, care coordination, or risk-based contract programs
• Microsoft Azure

How We'll Measure Success

• Time from a signed partner agreement to the first live patient- or provider-facing capability
• Number of partner integrations live and stable in production
• Adoption and utilization of Upperline capabilities across partner locations
• Share of partner-specific work promoted into core platform configuration rather than maintained as a one-off
• Partner CTOs and partner clinical leadership would ask to work with you again

Benefits

Comprehensive benefit options include medical, dental and vision, 401K (matching), PTO and parental leave.

Compensation

Compensation is commensurate to compensation for similar positions in the region and based on prior training and experience

Job Type: Full-time

Equal Opportunity Employer This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.