Staff Forward Deployed Platform Engineer

About the Role

AI FDE is a forward-deployed engineering team. Our customers are the people across Charlie Health who know a workflow best but cannot yet build software for it: Strategy, Clinical Operations, Admissions, Finance, Growth, People, and more. We sit with them and put AI to work on their highest-leverage workflows, whatever shape the right answer takes: a real internal app, an automation, a scheduled agent, or retiring a manual process outright. We run the platform that keeps what they build safe, and we measure success by the builder we leave behind, not the solution we ship.

As the Staff Forward Deployed Engineer leading AI FDE, you will own the team's roadmap and the platform behind it. Our paved road today is a vibe coding platform: a non-technical user completes the right training, builds a real application with AI, and ships it behind security controls, while Engineering keeps the rails safe. The platform will evolve as the tools change, but the bar stays fixed: idea to live in under a working day, without ever compromising guardrails. You will own those rails, run the engagements where we build with our customers, and own the training programs that decide who can build what.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role without direct reports. You lead through technical direction and the example of your own work. Most of your time goes to engagements, building alongside a customer, and the rest splits between the platform and training programs. We build with AI as the default: agents write most of the code, humans drive the product and review what ships, and the guardrails are what keep that safe in a HIPAA-regulated clinical business.

Responsibilities

• Lead the AI FDE team: its engagement model, operating cadence, and platform roadmap, in partnership with leadership
• Own the builder platform: the application templates, deployment pipelines, authentication, database, security scanning, and observability that make building safe by default
• Run forward-deployed engagements through their gates, from scoping the request, including saying no when an app is the wrong answer, to handing back a working solution and a builder who can change it without us
• Develop the builder training and certification programs, from the leveled curriculum to the gates that decide who can ship what, while IT owns seats and tooling access
• Hold the guardrails that make the platform safe and patient data secure
• Build with AI in front of non-technical users and make it teachable, modeling the skeptical review that keeps agent output safe
• Generalize the second instance of any request into a template feature or a paved-road pattern rather than a second bespoke build
• Assist in hiring and onboarding engineers to the team as it grows
• Feed engagement patterns and field notes back into the org's agentic tooling

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a meaningful stretch spent working directly with customers or non-technical users (forward deployed, solutions, or product engineering close to the people who use what you build)
• You ship quick prototypes and MVPs that turn a vague workflow into a working tool in days
• A teacher's instinct: you make technical concepts land for non-technical users without jargon or condescension
• You measure your success by what people can do without you, leaving a capable builder behind rather than a dependency on you
• Sound judgment under pressure: you hold a security or compliance line when the person across from you is senior and in a hurry, and you recognize when a workflow is too high-stakes to live on a builder platform at all
• A bias toward action: you would rather ship a rough thing to a real user and iterate than perfect it in isolation
• Familiarity with the agent tooling ecosystem: skills, MCPs, harnesses, and agent orchestration for software development
• You build with AI agents daily, treat their output with skepticism, and turn the failure patterns you spot into checks and boundaries that raise quality over time
• Strong communication and genuine empathy for how non-technical users actually work
• Comfort owning a platform in a regulated environment, where guardrails are not optional
• This role requires 4 days per week in our NYC office (Flatiron District)

Nice to Haves

• Founder, early-startup, or other generalist background where you owned a product end to end (a strong signal for this team)
• Healthcare or other experience engineering in a HIPAA-regulated environment
• You have built an internal platform, developer tooling, or a low-code or prototyping system
• Curriculum, enablement, or developer-advocacy work where you grew other people's skills
• Familiarity with our tech stack: Python, TypeScript, React, Postgres, Terragrunt, and AWS Lambda

Benefits

Charlie Health is pleased to offer comprehensive benefits to all full-time, exempt employees. Read more about our benefits here.

The total target base compensation for this role will be between $185,000 and $265,000 per year at the commencement of employment. Please note, pay will be determined on an individualized basis and will be impacted by location, experience, expertise, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. Further, cash compensation is only part of the total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may include stock options and other Charlie Health-sponsored benefits.