Founding Sales/Solutions Engineer

Artificer Health — Remote (US hours required)

Why this role exists

Practice managers have heard the pitch before. Someone walks in — or sends a cold email, or books a demo through a scheduling link — and tells them their prior authorization problem is solved. The product is polished. The deck is clean. The pricing page has a "Book a Demo" button.

Six months later, the staff is doing the same manual work they were doing before, plus supporting a piece of software that half-integrated with their EHR.

We are not that company. But we have to earn that.

Artificer Health exists to end the prior authorization burden — not optimize it, not "streamline" it. End it. We're pre-revenue, early, and deliberately small. Our first EHR integration is athenahealth. We're signing pilot clinics now, and every conversation we have with a practice in the next twelve months is either building or destroying the foundation this company stands on.

That's why this role exists. Not because we need quota hits. Because we need someone who can walk into a practice, sit across from a billing lead who has been burned by three vendors in four years, tell her exactly what Artificer can and cannot do today, and make her believe — on the merits — that we're the ones worth betting on.

That's a harder job than closing easy deals. It's also the only job worth doing right now.

What you'll actually do

Find the right practices. You'll own outbound prospecting from scratch. No BDR team. No inbound queue. You'll identify which medical practices are the best fit for an early-stage athenahealth integration — by specialty, size, prior auth volume, operational pain — and you'll build the pipeline yourself. That means research, targeted outreach, direct conversations, and knowing when a practice is the right pilot partner and when they're not.

Have honest conversations. You'll run every initial conversation and demo. You won't oversell. You'll ask questions about how a practice handles prior auth today — who does it, how long it takes, where it breaks down — and you'll map their actual situation to what Artificer does. Where there's a genuine fit, you'll close. Where there's a gap, you'll say so. Practices remember who told them the truth.

Answer the hard questions yourself. When a practice manager asks how our system connects to athenahealth, you'll explain it. When a physician asks what happens if a payer's portal goes down, you'll have the answer. When a billing lead asks about HIPAA compliance and where patient data lives, you won't say "let me loop in our engineer." You'll know the system well enough to represent it accurately and handle objections without backup.

Own the handoff. When a pilot clinic is ready to onboard, you'll manage the transition to the Forward Deployed Engineer and Support/Success Engineer. That handoff isn't a hand-off of accountability — it's a hand-off of primary point of contact. You'll stay close enough to know if onboarding goes sideways and intervene if it does.

Build the sales infrastructure. There is no playbook. You'll write it. First call framework, demo flow, objection handling, pilot agreement language, follow-up sequences, competitive positioning — none of it exists yet. You'll build it as you learn, document it as you go, and leave something useful for whoever comes after you.

Feed the product team. Every conversation with a practice is market research. What objections keep coming up? What features are they expecting that we don't have? What is a competitor telling them that we need to counter? You'll capture that consistently and bring it back in a form the product team can actually use — not as anecdote, as pattern.

What you bring

You know the practice world. You understand what a billing coordinator's day looks like. You know what prior authorization means to a front desk coordinator who's fielding calls from patients asking why their MRI is still pending. You've worked in healthcare — clinical, revenue cycle, practice management, health IT sales — or you've spent enough time alongside those teams to have real credibility when you're in the room. You don't need the glossary. You know what a peer-to-peer is, why PA denials get appealed, and what "retro auth" means in practice.

You can carry a technical conversation. You don't need to write code. You need to understand what athenahealth's API does and doesn't expose, how Artificer uses that data to build and submit authorization requests, what HIPAA-compliant data handling looks like in a cloud environment, and how to explain all of that in plain language to someone who is not a developer. You've sold or deployed technical products before. Integration questions don't make you reach for your phone.

You sell consultatively, not transactionally. You're not looking for the fastest path to a signature. You're looking for the right fit. You ask questions before you pitch. You qualify hard. You know that a bad pilot customer — one who wasn't really ready, or whose workflow doesn't actually match what we do — costs more than a lost deal.

You're comfortable selling something that isn't finished. This is the important one. Artificer is early. There are things the product does well today and things that are still being built. The right candidate doesn't hide that. They lead with what's real, explain the roadmap, and help a practice decide whether the timing is right for them. If you need a polished product, a mature sales deck, and inbound leads to work with, this isn't the right seat.

You run toward skeptics. The practices most burned by prior auth vendors are also the ones who have the most to gain from a solution that actually works. You don't avoid them. You seek them out, because earning their trust is worth more than closing ten easy deals.

You write and speak plainly. Your follow-up emails are short and direct. Your demo narration doesn't sound rehearsed. You don't use the word "synergy." When you don't know something, you say so and come back with the answer.

You're genuinely curious about how things work. Not just the product — the system. The billing infrastructure, the payer incentives, the regulatory machinery. If you've ever spent a Saturday afternoon savoring a patio11 essay about the hidden complexity inside some boring-sounding industry, you already understand why this company exists.

What we bring

Equity and a founding seat. This role shapes how Artificer goes to market. The sales motion you build here will be the sales motion we scale. You'll have equity, direct access to the founding team, and real input into product, positioning, and company direction. Your conversations with practices will change what we build.

A problem that matters. Prior authorization costs practices an average of 13 to 16 hours per week per staff member. Patients are waiting days or weeks for treatments that should take hours to approve. If reducing that burden is something you care about beyond the revenue target, you'll fit here. If it's just a market vertical to you, this probably isn't the right match.

No performance theater. We don't do quota boards, forced pipeline reviews, or activity metrics that measure effort instead of outcomes. We care whether the right clinics are signing on and whether they're succeeding. We'll know if that's happening and we'll tell you directly if it's not.

Directness in both directions. You'll hear honest feedback. We expect the same. If something in the product is killing deals, we want to know before we've lost ten of them. If the positioning is wrong, say it in the room, not after the fact.

A company that stays lean on purpose. This is not a stop on the way to a large enterprise sales org. We are building a small, durable company. That means your role will grow, but you will never be one layer in a seven-layer org chart.

Remote, with real flexibility. You need to be reachable during US business hours and available to support prospect conversations when they happen. Within that, how you structure your work is yours.

How to apply

Send an email to joinus@artificerhealth.com.

Skip the template. Tell us: what's broken about how health IT gets sold to medical practices, what you would do differently, and what the most honest sales conversation you've ever had with a skeptical prospect looked like. If you've built a sales process from scratch — what it was, how you built it, what you got wrong and fixed — we want to know.

We move fast. If there's a fit, you'll hear from us within a week.