Forward Deployed Solutions Engineer (I / II)

Attune; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Attune, a Chicago-based healthcare voice AI company, seeks a Forward Deployed Solutions Engineer to translate real client requirements into Attune workflows and voice agents. You’ll own deployments, work directly with clients, and turn requirements into testable plans.

Ideal candidates have an engineering or problem-solving background, comfort with structured configuration, and basic Python scripting. You’ll engage across the project lifecycle from discovery to go-live.

Qualifications

• Engineering or problem-solving background; CS/engineering degree or demonstrable self-taught technical systems.
• Comfort reading/writing structured configuration and reasoning about conditional logic.
• Ability to talk technically with non-technical clients without condescension or over-promising.

Responsibilities

• Sit in client conversations, listen for needs, and translate into a build plan.
• Build voice agents and YAML-defined workflows on the Attune platform.
• Write test scenarios, including edge cases, to validate builds.
• Debug live agent behavior and own deployments from start to go-live.
• Feed learned insights back into the product and client-facing processes.

Skills

Engineering background

Problem solving

Client-facing

Config reasoning

Python scripting

Education

CS/Engineering degree

Tools

Python

YAML

Git

Job description

Attune is a Chicago-based healthcare voice AI company building intelligent, compliant automation that helps healthcare organizations better engage patients and members at scale. Our platform powers critical outreach and communication workflows — from health risk assessments and scheduling to reminders, follow-up, and other moments that require clarity, trust, and responsiveness.

We believe technology should make care easier to access and easier to navigate. Our work is grounded in empathy, reliability, and responsible innovation, helping healthcare organizations improve outcomes while reducing operational burden.

Overview

We build production-grade voice agents for our healthcare clients, and we are staffing up a team of Forward Deployed Solutions Engineers to build and deliver these agents.

You will be building on the Attune platform — deeply, daily, and in front of clients — to turn messy real-world requirements into voice agents that work. On most engagements you'll be the person who owns the outcome, not a support function attached to someone who does. We’re looking for fast learners with engineering or problem-solving backgrounds, who are comfortable diving deep with clients.

What you'll actually do

• Sit in client conversations, listen for what they need rather than what they said, and turn it into a build plan.
• Build voice agents and YAML-defined workflows on the Attune platform.
• Write test scenarios that try to break your own work, including the edge cases nobody asked about.
• Debug live agent behavior — what the agent heard, what it decided, why it went wrong — and fix it.
• Own deployments outright. You are the owner: the client relationship, the requirements, the build, the tests, the go-live. On the genuinely novel deployments, you'll work alongside a Forward Deployed Engineer who owns the hardest technical calls.
• Feed what you learn back into the product. You'll be closer to real client pain than almost anyone at the company, and we'll expect you to say so loudly.

What we're looking for

Required:

• An engineering or problem-solving background — this can be a CS or engineering degree, a quantitative field, or a demonstrable track record of teaching yourself technical systems because you needed them to work.
• Comfort reading and writing structured configuration and reasoning about conditional logic and state.
• The ability to hold a technical conversation with a non-technical client without either condescending or over-promising.
• Genuine curiosity about failure modes. The best people in this role are the ones who ask "what happens if the caller interrupts here?" before anyone prompts them.
• Willingness to be wrong quickly and in public. Our feedback cycles are short.

Helpful but not required:

• Experience in implementation engineering, sales engineering, technical delivery, automation, QA, or analytics engineering.
• Any exposure to conversational AI, IVR, telephony, or contact center systems.
• Python or scripting for one-off data wrangling and testing.
• Client-facing experience at an early-stage company, where the job description was mostly a suggestion.

What we're explicitly not requiring:

• A software engineering degree or significant software development experience.
• Prior voice AI experience. We will teach you this — it's the part we're good at.

Levels

FDSE I is for people with roughly 0–2 years of experience. You'll build under review, own your test coverage, and grow into requirements work and then into owning deployments yourself. We expect to invest heavily in you for the first few months.

FDSE II is for people with roughly 2–5 years in an adjacent technical delivery role. You'll own standard deployments solo from the first client call to go-live, and we'll expect you to resolve ambiguity rather than expand it — and to recognize the cases where escalating is the right call.

Where this goes

There is a real path from FDSE II into Forward Deployed Engineer and Solution Engineering leadership, and people who want it will get direct support and mentorship toward it. There is also a real career at FDSE II and beyond for people who'd rather deepen client ownership than move toward platform work.

How we interview

One week, four conversations, no surprises:

• [Virtual] 30-minute screen — motivation, background, comp alignment.
• [Virtual] ~90-minute take-home assessment — a realistic client requirement, a lightweight version of our workflow documentation, and a build.
• [Onsite] 60-minute technical debrief — you walk us through what you built, then we change the requirement and think through it together.
• [Onsite] 45-minute client simulation — one of our FDEs plays a difficult client. We're interested in how you find the real requirement, not whether you say the perfect thing.

We'll tell you where you stand within two business days of the final conversation.