Forward Deployed Engineer

New York, NY · Full-time · Hybrid (in office 3 days a week) · $150,000 - $275,000 + equity

We’re deploying advanced agents into the real world to solve some of the biggest pain points in healthcare, and bringing the JOY back to healthcare by fixing the financial chaos behind it.

Every year, healthcare practices fail to collect an estimated $125 billion in earned revenue. The money disappears into fragmented financial data, manual workflows, and opaque payer systems that don’t talk to one another. Often, these costs are passed on to patients through higher bills or rising health costs, and for many practices the losses are fatal.

Joyful Health builds AI agents that take on insurers so providers get paid for the care they deliver. We didn’t start with a product. We spent ten months working as fractional CFOs for a dozen practices, doing the work alongside providers before we wrote the technology that automates it.

We just announced our $22M Series A, led by CRV, with world-class investors including the founders of MongoDB and KAYAK. Now we’re doubling our engineering team.

About the role

We’re hiring one of our first Forward Deployed Engineers to build out the function. You’ll sit between our largest customers and our product, and your core job is to craft our agent harness to meet the real-world needs of practices. You’ll design how our agents are orchestrated and train them on how each practice actually operates. To do that, you’ll embed with practices and their revenue cycle teams, learn how money moves through their systems, and build what gets them paid: agent workflows, data integrations, and custom tooling deployed on Joyful’s platform.

This is an engineering role with a commercial edge, well suited to founders and future founders. You’ll ship production code, lead working sessions with customers, and help grow accounts. You’ll also turn what you learn in the field into what we build next. As a founding FDE, you’ll write the playbook: how we onboard customers, what gets reused, what goes back to the product, and eventually how we build the team.

What you’ll do

• Own customer deployments end to end, from signed contract to a live, measurable result. Get each practice’s data flowing into Joyful, encode their payer rules and workflows into how our agent works, and keep tuning it as results come back.
• Direct our agent and build account-specific solutions quickly (agent logic, analyses, automations, dashboards), then work with engineering to fold the winners into the core platform.
• Run working sessions with customers’ revenue cycle teams. Map their workflows, find where revenue slips through, and turn that into a scoped plan with clear outcomes.
• Create SOPs and work closely with our revenue cycle specialists, turning what they learn from accounts into better agent behavior.
• Partner with the account team on renewals and expansion, bringing the results and insights that show customers the value we deliver. Be the engineer customers trust.
• Be the voice of the customer inside Joyful. Turn field insight into clear problem statements, specs and roadmap input.
• Build the FDE function: deployment playbooks, reusable patterns, internal tooling, success metrics and, over time, helping grow the team.

We’d love to hear from you if…

• You’re passionate about Joyful Health’s mission. You want to solve real, pressing problems for providers and put them in control of their businesses. You naturally empathize with users and enjoy building with their needs in mind.
• You’re an engineer who loves being in front of customers. You have 3+ years of full-time engineering experience in software, AI or data engineering, and you’ve moved toward customer-facing work, whether as an FDE, a solutions or deployment engineer, or the engineer who always ended up on customer calls.
• You have strong technical execution. You’re AI-native and fluent in Python and SQL, comfortable across backend systems, data pipelines and APIs, and experienced integrating with messy third-party systems. You’ve built hands-on with LLMs and agents, from turning business rules into agent logic to debugging it when it gets things wrong. Side projects count.
• You think commercially. You can find the business problem behind a feature request, scope work to the outcome that matters, and explain technical trade-offs to a practice owner as easily as to an engineer.
• You have a radical sense of ownership. You’ve shown clear growth in scope and responsibility, you thrive in ambiguity, and you can turn a single customer conversation into a plan and a working prototype.
• You have a low ego and a growth mindset, and you’re excited to shape our engineering team and culture as an early team member.
• Education: a degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Bonus points

• You’ve been a founder or an early engineer at a startup.
• You have experience with healthcare data, revenue cycle management or payer workflows. It’s not required, but you’ll need to get deep fast: within weeks you’ll be reading remits and researching payer policy.
• You’ve done the unglamorous data work that makes messy real-world inputs usable.

Working at Joyful

🚀 Meaningful impact. You’ll work on one of the most hair-on-fire problems providers face, so they can focus on caring for patients.

🔑 Autonomy and ownership. As our founding FDE, you’ll shape the function and the company from the ground up.

📈 Growth and learning. You’ll get direct access to experienced founders and advisors, plus stipends for professional development courses and books.

💰 Competitive compensation and equity. $150K - $275K base, plus strong equity in Joyful Health.

❤️ Be your best self. Comprehensive healthcare benefits, unlimited PTO (with a minimum of 10 days off a year), flexibility, and regular team off-sites and events.

Please apply even if you don’t meet 100% of the criteria. Nobody checks every box every time, and we’d love to talk with you about how you see yourself growing into this role. We’re also very open to candidates with non-traditional experience.

Joyful Health is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic.