Forward Deployed Engineer ($110k-$160k, 0.1% to 0.5%)

Resonate AI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A healthcare AI startup is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to deploy custom AI solutions in dental practices. This entry-level role combines engineering, customer engagement, and product management, offering hands-on experience with real-world deployments. You will work directly with customers to optimize AI products and drive solutions for seamless patient communication workflows. Opportunities for growth in a rapidly scaling company are plentiful, as you will learn to develop impactful AI technologies that transform dental operations.

Qualifications

• 1-4 years of software engineering experience with the ability to write production-quality code.
• Deployment experience with actual customer environments.
• Understanding of how multiple technical systems interact.

Responsibilities

• Deploy and optimize AI voice agents in production environments.
• Write production-grade code for custom integrations.
• Analyze customer workflows to improve AI agent performance.

Skills

Software engineering experience

Production-quality code

Real-world deployment experience

Comfort with ambiguity

Systems thinking

Communication skills

Job description

Forward Deployed Engineer ($110k-$160k, 0.1% to 0.5%)

Founder, CEO @ Resonate AI | Ex-Houzz & Microsoft | Forbes Tech Council

About Resonate AI

We're building superhuman conversational AI for healthcare. Our first AI product captures missed calls and books appointments with a higher success rate than human receptionists.

People love the product. We're growing rapidly and working with some of the biggest dental groups in the country. We have raised funding from great investors and are now hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to build cutting-edge generative AI experiences. You will work directly with the founder and customers to create, design, and deploy these AI agents.

The Role (Ideal for candidates in early part of their career)

As our Forward Deployed and Implementation Engineer, you'll be the critical link between our AI technology and real-world dental practice operations. You'll embed directly with multi-site DSO customers —building, deploying, and optimizing our AI voice and text agents in production environments.

This is a hybrid role between a solutions engineering role + software engineering + Product Management where you build features for many customers. You'll own the entire implementation lifecycle for customer deployment from integrating their systems like EHR (Electronic Health Record), understanding their unique scheduling flow and deploying custom AI agents. You will then write production code to automate as much part of your role as you can :)

What You'll Actually Do

Customer Deployment & Integration

• Prompt Engineering at its core along with tool and function calling.
• Embed directly with dental practices and DSOs to understand their patient communication workflows, call handling processes, and revenue leakage points.
• Build and deploy custom AI voice agents, appointment booking workflows, and multi-modal (voice + text) patient engagement systems.
• Create Evaluations and simulations environments to see how our Agents perform before they go live.

Technical Problem Solving

• Write production-grade code to build custom integrations when off-the-shelf solutions don't exist.
• Debug complex multi-system issues spanning our AI platform, telephony infrastructure, PMS systems, and customer networks.
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks to measure AI agent performance: call capture rates, booking conversion, revenue attribution.
• Optimize prompt engineering and agent behavior based on actual call data and customer feedback.

Product Development Feedback Loop

• Identify patterns across multiple customer deployments that should become core platform features.
• Work directly with our engineering team to translate field requirements into product specs.
• Prototype rapid solutions for customer needs, then collaborate to productize them for scale.
• Contribute code to our core platform when customer learnings reveal generalizable improvements.
• Maintain detailed documentation of integration patterns, customer workflows, and deployment best practices.

Customer Success & Growth

• Own the long-term technical relationship with major customers (dental groups, DSOs).
• Work with Customer Success to Conduct regular performance reviews with customers, demonstrating ROI through data.
• Identify expansion opportunities based on customer workflows (e.g., extending from inbound calls to outbound).

What You Bring — Required Technical Skills

• 1-4 years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated ability to write production-quality code.
• Real‑world deployment experience: you've shipped code that runs in production customer environments, not just internal tools.
• Comfort with ambiguity: ability to scope and execute projects where requirements emerge through customer discovery.
• Systems thinking: understanding how multiple technical systems interact and where failure points occur.

Startup‑Specific Requirements

• High agency and ownership mentality: you don't wait for perfect specs—you figure out what needs to be done and do it. You are going to be your own PM, Designer, Engineer or any other role that is needed.
• Scrappiness over polish: you can build an 80% solution in 2 days rather than a 100% solution in 2 weeks.
• Customer empathy: genuine interest in understanding how dental practices operate and where they struggle.
• Communication skills: ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders (office managers, dentists).

Strong Preferences (Not Required)

• Experience with LLMs, prompt engineering.
• Previous experience at an early‑stage startup or in a customer‑facing technical role.
• Exposure to telephony systems, voice AI, or real‑time communication platforms.

Why This Role Is Unique

• You’ll have a disproportionate impact. As our FDE, you’ll define how we deploy AI at scale. Every integration pattern you build, every customer workflow you document, and every product insight you surface will shape our platform for years.
• You’ll see immediate business impact. When you deploy an AI agent that captures $$ in new patient production for a practice, you get direct feedback within days. No six‑month product cycles—you ship, measure, and iterate rapidly.
• You’ll become a domain expert in deploying AI Agents. You’ll understand the $160B+ dental industry from the inside: how practices operate, where technology fails them, and how AI can transform their economics. .
• You’ll build the foundation for scaling. What you learn deploying to 10 practices becomes the playbook for deploying to 100, then 1,000. You're not just implementing—you're designing the scaling motion.

You’ll thrive here if you:

• Get energized by solving concrete customer problems rather than abstract technical challenges.
• Enjoy the “consultant + builder” hybrid where you own execution.
• Value autonomy and direct impact over process and hierarchy.
• Are genuinely curious about how businesses operate and where software can improve them.

Seniority level

• Entry level

Employment type

• Full‑time

Job function

• Engineering and Information Technology

Industries

• Technology, Information and Internet

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