Forward Deployed Engineer (Data Integration)

Kadence is partnered with a HealthTech company in the Bay Area, looking for their first FDE profile.

Role:

Founding Forward Deployment Engineer | Healthcare Data Integration

Early-Stage AI Startup | Bay Arwa, CA | Hybrid | $140K–$180K + Equity

Our client is looking to build the infrastructure layer that makes fragmented healthcare data environments actually work. Think EHRs, SFTP drops, PDFs, faxes, flat files, and legacy operational systems, all living inside the same customer environment. Their platform turns that chaos into reliable, operational data that powers billing workflows, automation, and analytics at scale.

They're early, well-backed, and moving fast.

The Role

This is a founding technical hire. You'll own the last mile of our customer deployments, going into hospital and health system environments, figuring out what's there, and building the pipelines to make it work.

This is not a consulting role. You write production code. You own the outcome.

80% coding. 20% customer-facing.

What You'll Actually Do

• Build data ingestion pipelines from scratch across messy, undocumented customer environments
• Extract and transform data from PDFs, databases, flat files, faxes, emails, operational exports, and whatever else you find
• Map customer data into canonical schemas and validate outputs
• Serve as the technical point of contact with customer teams during deployment
• Turn one-off integration patterns into reusable playbooks that make the next deployment faster

Who We're Looking For

• 2–5 years in data engineering, integration engineering, solutions engineering, or similar
• Strong Python and SQL, you write code that runs in production, not just notebooks
• Comfortable working across unknown systems with incomplete documentation
• Experience with diverse data sources and file formats, structured and unstructured
• Multi-client or multi-team background strongly preferred
• Clear communicator who can set technical expectations with non-technical stakeholders
• Healthcare background helpful, not required, fintech, insurance, legal tech, or any messy data environment counts

Why This Role

• Founding hire with real equity and real ownership
• Direct access to leadership and product direction
• You're not maintaining someone else's system, you're building the playbook from scratch
• 25% travel, roughly once a month