Senior Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

NextBigWhat; United States; On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Dental/Vision insurance

FSA/HSA benefits

Flexible PTO

401(k) with company match

Insurance package

Job summary

OpenLoop is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager in the United States to lead Forward Deployed Engineering and own client outcomes across the portfolio. You will embed with clients, review integrations, and turn top performers into a scalable, high-performing team while maintaining technical credibility with client and platform engineers.

You’ll guide pods, allocate capacity, migrate clients to the Partner API, and collaborate across engineering, implementation, customer success, and sales.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers: hiring, performance, leveling and promotions, and growing a team.
• Experience delivering in customers’ environments and discussing deployments that went smoothly or challenged.
• Experience migrating or re-platforming for customers and allocating a team against demand.

Responsibilities

• Own client outcomes across the portfolio and spot troubled deployments with actionable details.
• Allocate capacity and assign new clients with ownership and clear displacements.
• Lead pods through their architects with clear ownership and escalation practices.
• Migrate existing clients onto the Partner API, coordinating with implementation and client teams.
• Own the seam with platform teams and decide who builds gaps and set dates for resolutions.
• Provide go-live exits with documented sign-off to prevent ad-hoc support.
• Hire and develop FDEs and Deployment Strategists; coach toward scope and timelines.
• Own the agent roster and oversee deployments with human oversight and adoption measures.
• Protect the discipline by ensuring changes are additive or properly proposed.

Skills

Team leadership

Engineering management

Hiring & promotions

API integrations

Platform architecture

Security & compliance

Education

BS in CS or Engineering

Job description

About OpenLoop

OpenLoop was co-founded by CEO, Dr. Jon Lensing, and COO, Christian Williams, with the vision to bring care anywhere. Our telehealth support solutions are thoughtfully designed to streamline and simplify go-to-market care delivery for companies offering meaningful virtual support to patients across an expansive array of specialties, in all 50 states.

About the Role

Forward Deployed Engineering is how we build our platform with real clients instead of guessing. An FDE embeds with a client, works in their codebase, and builds their integration against OpenLoop’s production API. Anything the platform can’t do yet is filed as a gap and built once, centrally, so every client inherits it. The real work product isn’t the integration. It’s the reusable asset that client forced into existence.

As Senior Engineering Manager, you own this team and you’re measured on two things: clients going live with a clean handoff, and a team that gets better at it every quarter. The team is already delivering and growing fast. Your job is to turn strong individuals into a function, and to scale it without lowering the bar.

This is a player-coach role, coaching first. You stay technical through review, not by owning a client yourself. You read integration designs, adjudicate platform gaps, and stay credible with both client engineering leaders and our platform engineers. If you want to stop reviewing code entirely, or to write code instead of managing people, this isn’t the role.

You’ll report into Engineering and work daily with platform, implementation, customer success and sales.

What You'll Do

• Own client outcomes across the portfolio. Every client in build has a named owner and a go-live date. Spot a troubled deployment before the client does, and report it with the date, impact and trade-off.

• Allocate capacity. Assign new clients on the day they arrive, with an owner and a clear statement of what they displace. When client, migration and platform work compete, you make the call.

• Lead pods through their architects. Each pod has an FDE acting as technical architect. Give them clear ownership, real decision rights, and a habit of escalating early.

• Migrate existing clients onto the Partner API. Move them in cohorts with implementation, platform engineering and the client’s team. Respect change calendars, and measure each move by its first production patient.

• Own the seam with platform teams. Each gap names the capability it stands in for. Decide who builds it, and elevate stalled reviews with a date.

• Give every go-live an exit. Clients leave hypercare on a set date, documented and signed off, so the team doesn’t become the support desk.

• Hire and develop. You’re the hiring manager for FDEs and Deployment Strategists at every level. Coach toward scope, run hard conversations on time, defend leveling decisions, and run reviews with no surprises.

• Own the agent roster. The team runs deployments on agents (readiness, conformance, seeding, docs, gap filing, client comms), and a human approves every output. You own adoption, measurement and where the human sits.

• Protect the discipline. Never wire around the platform. Make changes additive or explicitly superseding. Anything that would break a live client becomes a proposal, not a merge, even under deadline pressure.

• Partner with go-to-market. Be in the room before commitments are made. Distinguish “can’t,” “shouldn’t” and “won’t fit the timeline,” and turn the prioritized client list into a dated plan.

• Write the playbook. Turn how your best engineers deploy into how the team deploys, so each new deployment needs less of you.

Who You Are

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers: hiring, performance, leveling and promotions, and growing a team.

• You’ve led teams delivering in customers’ environments, and you can talk through deployments that went badly and what you changed.

• You’ve run a migration or re-platforming program with customers who could say no, and you’ve allocated a team against more demand than supply.

• You’re still technical: deep in integrations (APIs, auth, webhooks vs. polling, idempotency, schema drift, reconciliation) and able to change a design with one question.

• You build with AI agents and have a view on human-in-the-loop design, evaluation, and handling confident errors.

• You’re security-first with sensitive data and treat compliance as a design input.

• You’ve told customers or sales “no” or “not in that timeline” and kept the relationship, and you can name things you descoped and why.

• You’ve had impact beyond your own team through tooling, practices or platform changes.

Preferred

• Healthcare or other regulated-domain experience; EHR, scheduling, pharmacy or payments integrations (FHIR a plus).

• You’ve managed managers, led teams through organizational change, or scaled an FDE, solutions engineering or professional services function.

• Developer platform experience (SDKs, CLIs, API conventions, tested docs).

• Comfortable in pre-sales technical conversations.

• BS in CS or Engineering, or equivalent experience.

Our Benefits

In addition, for salaried positions you would also be eligible for:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision plans

• Flexible Spending/Health Savings Accounts

• Flexible PTO

• 401(k) + Company Match

• Life Insurance, Pet insurance, and more

Our Company

We have a relatively flat organizational structure here at OpenLoop. Everyone is encouraged to bring ideas to the table and make things happen. This fits in well with our core values of Autonomy, Competence and Belonging, as we want everyone to feel empowered and supported to do their best work.

Sound like a good fit? We’d love to meet you.