Forward Deployed Engineer - AI Consultant

The Role

You are an embedded operator who bridges frontier AI methodology and production-grade operational reality inside healthcare organizations. Unlike traditional advisory work, you do not stop at slideware and recommendations. You run our four-week AI Jumpstart Discovery cycle end to end — kickoff, department-by-department stakeholder interviews, executive prioritization workshop, final readout — and you ship a prioritized opportunity portfolio, current-state and future-state process models, ROI math, and a 90-day execution plan that the client's CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, or CMIO will fund and act on. 

You are the high-agency owner of the engagement. The methodology is documented, the AI deliverable pipeline is built, and the back-office team that operates it is in place. What we need is the senior practitioner who can sit in the room with healthcare executives, earn their trust, and convert ambiguous operational pain into a concrete, fundable roadmap. You can expect to travel up to 30% of the time for this position.

What This Role Is — And What It Is Not 

The Forward Deployed Engineer title in 2026 covers a wide spectrum, from contractors writing agentic code inside a customer's runtime to AI-focused consultants running discovery and integration engagements. PTM sits firmly on the consultant-architect end of that spectrum, and we are explicit about it. 

You will: embed inside client operations for the duration of a Discovery engagement, lead structured interviews, facilitate workshops, direct PTM's four-agent transcript-to-roadmap pipeline, quality-assure every deliverable that goes to the client, and own the relationship from kickoff through Statement of Work for the implementation phase. 

You will not: write production software that ships inside the client's runtime. We have a Fusion Development practice that does that. Discovery is upstream of build, and you are the senior practitioner on the Discovery side. 

If you came into the FDE category hoping to write code at a customer's desk, this is not that job. If you came into it because you want to be the person who turns boardroom anxiety about AI into a concrete, ROI-defensible roadmap inside a real healthcare operation — and you want to do it at a firm with documented methodology, working AI tooling, and an implementation team standing behind the scope you write — this is exactly the job. 

What You Will Actually Do 

• Run the 30-day AI Jumpstart Discovery cycle: kickoff, eight to fifteen department-level event-storming interviews, AI-assisted analysis, executive prioritization workshop, and final readout. 
• Apply our pain-first discovery method. You surface drudgery, manual handoffs, bottlenecks, and broken approvals before any tool conversation. The "tool-first" trap is the failure mode we exist to prevent. 
• Facilitate executive prioritization workshops that resolve a portfolio of 15 to 30 candidates into a ranked Top 5: three quick wins (high value, low risk) and two strategic bets (high value, high complexity), each defensible with math. 
• Co-design current-state and future-state BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) maps with department owners, applying our Digital Assembly Line model to identify where AI, document understanding, and programmatic automation replace manual toil. 
• Translate findings into ROI projections the CFO will accept — labor reallocation, cycle-time reduction, denial-rate movement, throughput per FTE, audit exposure, prior-auth turnaround, whatever the workflow demands. 
• Direct the four-agent deliverable pipeline that converts transcripts into client-ready artifacts (opportunity extraction → current/future BPMN → department reports → org-wide consolidation). You do not operate it line by line — that is what the Product Analyst on your engagement does — but you set quality, own QA against transcripts, and sign off before anything reaches the client. 
• Address the blockers that prevent AI from reaching enterprise-grade maturity in real operations: data readiness, integration complexity, change-management friction, HIPAA and PHI boundaries, governance constructs the client cannot articulate yet. 
• Act as the feedback loop into PTM's Fusion methodology and tooling. Every engagement you run produces field signal that updates our interview guide, our prompt library, our BPMN style guide, and our healthcare-vertical playbook. Your work compounds across the practice. 
• Carry the relationship from Discovery into the implementation Statement of Work. You participate in scope development and maintain continuity into the build phase. 

Healthcare Context You Already Operate In 

You do not need software engineering experience. You do need fluency in how healthcare operations actually run. We expect you to have led work in two or more of these areas: 

• Hospital or health-system operations: admissions, scheduling, OR throughput, length of stay, transfers, capacity management. 

• Revenue cycle: intake, eligibility and benefits, prior authorization, charge capture, coding, denials, AR follow-up, patient financial services. 

• Clinical workflow and documentation: provider documentation burden, order management, clinical messaging, care coordination, post-acute handoffs. 

• Payer operations: claims adjudication, utilization management, provider data, appeals. 

• Healthcare IT advisory: EHR-adjacent integration, interoperability, HIE, HL7 / FHIR-aware workflow design. 

You understand HIPAA, PHI handling, and the practical line between operational data and protected data. You have sat across from a CMIO, a VP of Revenue Cycle, or a COO and earned the right to ask hard questions. 

What "Senior" and "High-Agency" Mean Here 

You can do the following without being told: 

• Walk into a kickoff with twelve unfamiliar stakeholders and end the hour with their trust. 

• Hear the difference between "we are frustrated by X" and "X costs us $4M a year." Pull the second from people who only said the first. 

• Write an executive summary the CEO will actually read — one page, plain language, clear recommendation. 

• Disagree with a senior client respectfully and productively when their proposed pilot is the wrong starting point. 

• Run a workshop where seven department heads with conflicting priorities reach a ranked list everyone can defend. 

• Own scope. No one will hand you a spec, and scope ambiguity is yours to resolve. If an engagement does not ship its roadmap on day 30, that is your problem. 

What We Cross-Train You On 

PTM's Fusion methodology is opinionated. You will not need to invent it. In your first 60 days we train you on: 

• The Discovery Covenant — pain-first thesis, Digital Assembly Line model, our writing standard. 

• The structured interview guide — question library, event-storming protocol, BPMN style. 

• The four-agent deliverable pipeline — what it produces, what your Product Analyst partner does, how to QA every stage. 

• Deliverable templates — Solution Architecture Document, Solution Design Document, milestone roadmap, Statement of Work, with ROI and KPI framing. 

• The implementation handoff — how Discovery feeds Fusion Development and how we keep continuity for the client. 

You leave cross-training able to run a Discovery engagement solo, with Product Analyst support and Practice Lead review.

Requirements

Qualifications

• Eight or more years in healthcare operations, healthcare consulting (Big 4, boutique, or in-house transformation), or healthcare-IT advisory. 

• Client-facing engagement leadership at the director, VP, or partner-track level. You have owned engagements, not contributed to them. 

• Working knowledge of at least one major EHR ecosystem (Epic, Oracle Health / Cerner, Meditech, athenahealth) at the workflow level. You do not need to build in it. 

• Track record of executive-ready deliverables under tight cycles. 

• Curiosity about applied AI in operational workflows. You do not need to be an AI specialist. You do need to be willing to learn our methodology deeply and apply it with discipline. Fluency with tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Microsoft 365 Copilot at a deliberate-operator level is expected within 90 days if you do not already have it. 

• US work authorization. 

Nice to Have 

• PE-portfolio company exposure or experience working with operating partners. 

• Familiarity with BPMN, Lean, Six Sigma, or a comparable process-modeling discipline. 

• Prior experience with discovery- or assessment-driven sales motions. 

How This Role Differs from FDE Roles at the Big Labs 

We are watching the same market you are. Google Cloud, OpenAI's Deployment Company, and Anthropic's new consulting venture are all hiring FDEs at scale. Those roles offer real reach and a few honest tradeoffs: large logos, large clients, often-undefined scope, often-outsourced organizational structure. PTM is the alternative for senior practitioners who would rather: 

• Work in a focused vertical (healthcare) with a documented methodology, instead of one generalist agentic-coding engagement after another. 

• Be a named principal on every engagement, instead of one FDE in a pool of hundreds. 

• Carry a relationship across Discovery and implementation, instead of handing off and moving on. 

• Operate at a firm where the Discovery practice and the Development practice are under one roof and one operating philosophy. 

Why This Role Exists Now 

PTM's Fusion Discovery practice is scaling from one practitioner to a full team, and we are building the healthcare vertical first because the pain is concrete, the workflows are well-defined, and the ROI is visible to a CFO inside a quarter. You will be the second or third person in this practice. The methodology, the AI pipeline, and the client portfolio are real today. What is not yet built is the team. That is the opportunity. 

Benefits

Possibility of contract-to-hire

• Full Medical Benefits
• 2 Weeks Paid Vacation
• Full Time
• Dental & vision insurance
• 401(k) matching