Senior Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

Open Loop 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.

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 Open Loop’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.

• 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.

• 8+ years in software engineering, including 3+ years managing engineers: hiring, performance, leveling and promotions, and…