Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Artificer Health — Remote (US hours required)

Why this role exists

Every clinic we work with has a different EHR setup, a different billing workflow, a different way of doing things that made sense to someone at some point and is now just how it is. Prior auth gets layered on top of all of that. Our job is to make Artificer work inside that reality — not the clean version of it, the real one.

That's what this role is for.

We're building Artificer Health to end the prior authorization nightmare, not improve it by 15%. We're pre-revenue. We're early. Our first EHR integration is athenahealth, and we're onboarding pilot clinics right now. What happens in those first deployments — how fast we get live, how well the staff actually uses the system, how honestly we handle what breaks — sets the trajectory for everything else.

A Forward Deployed Engineer at Artificer is not a solutions architect who writes decks. You go into the actual environment. You figure out what's mapped wrong, what the API is rejecting, why the practice manager's workflow doesn't match what we assumed during build, and you fix it. Then you come back and tell the engineering team exactly what we got wrong so we don't get it wrong again.

You will also sit across from a front desk coordinator who has been doing this job for eleven years, has seen four software vendors promise to fix everything, and is deeply skeptical. You need to earn her trust in under an hour. That means plain talk, real answers, and no condescension.

This is a founding seat. You won't inherit a playbook. You'll build it from scratch, with whatever you figure out in the first few deployments. It will not be comfortable. It will matter enormously.

What you'll actually do

Integration setup and configuration. Get Artificer connected to a clinic's athenahealth environment. Handle the data mapping, configure the integration to their specific setup, and verify that prior auth data is flowing correctly before you hand anything off. When something breaks mid-deployment, you debug it — live, with the clinic waiting.

Real-world troubleshooting. API errors in production environments that don't match staging. Data fields that exist in the spec but not in this practice's instance. Custom EHR configurations that nobody documented. This is the job. You find the problem, fix it, and close the loop with engineering on what caused it.

Staff training. You train the humans who will actually use Artificer every day — practice managers, billing coordinators, front desk staff. These are not technical users. They are already stretched thin. Your job is to make Artificer feel like something that makes their day easier, not another system to manage. That means explaining things clearly, without jargon, without making anyone feel slow for asking questions, and building confidence fast.

Implementation playbooks and documentation. Every deployment teaches you something. You write it down. You build the playbooks, the training materials, the configuration guides that make the next deployment faster. You're not just doing the work — you're building the repeatable version of the work.

Feed the product team the truth. What broke. What confused people. What we assumed in the product that turned out to be wrong. You are the direct line between real-world clinical environments and the engineers building Artificer. That feedback loop is one of the most valuable things this role produces. Use it.

Travel and remote sessions. Some deployments will be on-site. Most will be screen-sharing sessions. You need to be effective in both contexts and available during US business hours.

What you bring

• You can read and write code. Not as a hobby — as a working skill. You debug API integrations, write scripts when you need them, and work comfortably with databases.
• You have worked with EHR systems in a real capacity. athenahealth experience is a significant advantage. FHIR/HL7 knowledge is a real plus.
• You understand how prior authorization works — not the concept, the actual process. What information is required, how it moves between a practice and a payer, where it fails and why.
• You understand medical billing well enough to have a real conversation with a billing coordinator about their workflow without needing her to explain what a payer is.
• You have done customer-facing technical work before. Not sales engineering. The real thing — sitting with users, figuring out why something isn't working in their environment, getting it to work.
• You communicate without jargon. When you explain something technical to a non-technical person, you explain it — you don't abbreviate it into a word they don't know.
• You don't wait to be handed a solution. You figure it out and move.
• You're comfortable with ambiguity because you understand that this is an early company and the ambiguity is the job right now.
• You're the kind of person who considers a new patio11 essay about the absurd complexity hiding inside some boring-sounding system a perfectly good way to spend an afternoon. That instinct — wanting to understand how things actually work, not how the vendor says they work — is most of this job.

What we bring

An actual problem worth solving. Prior authorization costs the US healthcare system somewhere around $13 billion a year in administrative burden. Practice staff spend 13 to 16 hours per week on it. Patients wait for care that has already been ordered. None of this is necessary and we intend to prove that.

A founding role with real influence over how this company builds. The decisions you make in the first six months of deployments will shape Artificer's implementation methodology for years. That's not marketing language. It's what it actually means to be first.

Honest communication. We're pre-revenue and we'll tell you that. We're working through our first pilot deployments and we'll tell you that too. What we can tell you is that the mission is real, the problem is real, and we're not going to waste your time with theater.

Compensation commensurate with a founding role — equity included.

How to apply

Send an email to joinus@artificerhealth.com.

No application portal. No form to fill out. Write us an email that tells us who you are, what you've actually done in the space, and why this role makes sense for you right now. If you've dealt with a gnarly EHR integration or trained non-technical staff on something that didn't quite work yet, tell us that story. We want to understand how you think and how you communicate, not what your resume looks like formatted correctly.

We read everything. We'll respond.