Forward Deployed Engineer

Who We Are

A few weeks ago a 95-year-old patient called one of our practices. She apologized for being long-winded before she’d said much of anything. “I promise my mind is still very sharp,” she said; you could hear in her voice that she’d been made to feel otherwise. Our agent didn’t cut her off. It listened. She thanked it at the end of the call for being so patient.

She probably didn’t know she was talking to AI. But she felt that someone had listened.

Most voice agent companies in healthcare are racing to solve one thing: getting patients off hold fast enough to schedule an appointment. We think that’s the wrong finish line. The moment a patient calls is just the beginning: there’s the referral fax, the insurance check, the prescription refill, the follow-up, the billing. Most of it is invisible to the patient and exhausting for the practice. We’re building the platform that handles all of it, with the patient at the center of every touchpoint.

We’re 2 years in and working with 400+ medical practices across 27 specialities, including primary care, dermatology, optometry, and mental health. One Medical's founder is an investor. We've raised over $13M in VC funding and grew ARR 10x last year, which means it's a great time to join.

The Role

You’d be one of the first few dedicated Agent Engineer at Parakeet. There’s no playbook for this yet… you’d be writing it.

In practice: you’re in customer calls four or five times a week, translating what you hear into decisions and working prototypes (sometimes before the call even ends). You’re the person who holds context on both sides: what the customer needs, what our platform can do, and what the gap is. You make the call on what gets built now, what gets pushed, and what becomes a roadmap item. Nobody’s going to make that call for you.

Healthcare scheduling is not OpenTable. A doctor might only want to see new patients in the morning and existing patients in the afternoon because that doctor runs out of steam by afternoon (and yes, that’s a real rule we’ve had to build for). Multiply that by every practice, every specialty, and every quirk that’s now yours to translate into something an AI agent can execute. If that sounds like a fascinating puzzle rather than a grind, you’re probably the right person for this role.

Then there's the part that makes this more than an implementation job: the best version of this role is someone who hears something from a customer on Monday and has a working prototype to show them by Tuesday. Prototypes are the new PRDs. The gap between “I heard something interesting today” and “let me show you what I built” should be measured in hours, not sprints.

Here’s a good example of how we operate: a customer told us they were drowning in 50,000 unprocessed faxes a month. The next day we had them forwarding faxes into our system. Within two weeks we had an MVP running on actual production faxes: a tool that reads incoming referrals and prior authorizations and calls the patient to schedule them. That product is live today, and what used to take 5 to 7 days now takes just one minute. The FDE is the tip of the spear on what we discover and build next. Most large healthcare practices are used to waiting 6-9 months for something like that. We did it in 2 weeks.

A Day in Your Life

No two days look the same, but here’s a realistic sketch:

Morning: You jump on a call with a new eyecare customer’s office manager to walk through how they handle appointment recalls. You learn they have a specific routing rule: patients who haven’t been seen in 18+ months need to be scheduled with their original provider, but if that provider has left, they need a fallback with a different call script, and insurance needs to be checked again. You’re taking notes and already sketching how to express this in the platform before she’s even finished explaining it.

Late morning: You’re configuring a deployment for a multi-specialty medical group in NYC. Their eClinicalWorks integration needs a tweak to pull the right appointment types for their specialty scheduling flow. You push a fix, test it against their sandbox, and watch the agent nail the booking. (Small win. Onto the next one.)

After lunch: Weekly sync with one of our largest enterprise accounts: a dermatology group with hundreds of locations across the country. Their VP of Operations is a fast talker with a top-notch Hawaiian shirt game. He’s both deeply knowledgeable about their practice and genuinely excited about what’s possible with technology. Today he flags that they get 30,000 voicemails a month that nobody’s getting to. You’ve been thinking about this since hearing something similar from another customer last week. You sketch a quick prototype with Claude Code—what insights to derive, what automated actions the agent could take—and share your screen to get his reaction. The VP says: “I love it. Tell me the S3 bucket, I’ll send you two thousand mp3s tonight, and we’ll regroup next week.”

End of day: You sync with me and the engineering team. You share what you heard from customers, demo the prototype you built, and talk through what should become a real feature versus a one-off. (And by tomorrow morning, you’ll have two thousand mp3s to dig into.)

Your First Six Months

Month 1: Get your hands dirty. You’ll shadow Cecilia and Sumedh through a real customer onboarding—picking up the scheduling rules that vary practice-to-practice, getting familiar with our EHR integrations, and listening to actual patient calls. We record everything, which means you can ramp up on months of customer history in days. By the end of month one you’ll have a feel for how the platform works and where its edges are.

Month 2: Own deployments end-to-end. You're leading now. That means scoping a customer’s scheduling workflows, customizing the agent to their SOPs, integrating with their EHR, QA-ing performance, and iterating with their ops team until it’s humming. You and Tom are the one-two punch that gets a practice live in two weeks—fast enough that customers who’ve dealt with other healthcare vendors can’t quite believe it. You’re also starting to form real opinions about where the platform has gaps.

Month 6: Shape what we build next. We’ve hired more FDEs and you’re the one showing them the ropes. But the bigger shift is this: you’re not just deploying anymore; you’re discovering. You’ve seen enough variation across customers to know what the platform needs next. You’re prototyping new capabilities, bringing them back to the team, and directly influencing the roadmap. For our largest enterprise deals, you’re getting pulled into pre-sales and building custom demos that help close contracts.

Who Thrives Here

I’ll be straight with you: this role is probably not for you if customer calls feel like an interruption. They’re 15-20% of your week—not a tax on the job, but the job. The engineers who thrive here are the ones who leave a customer call energized, because they just learned something that’s going to make the product better or will delight the customer.

The other thing that trips people up: we don’t have a PM handing out detailed Jira (yuck) tickets. You have customer context, platform knowledge, and a prioritization instinct. You'll riff with our co-founder/CPO Eric to make the call. What’s a real requirement right now, what’s a phase two item, what needs to go to the core engineering team. Some engineers find that freedom exhilarating. Others find it paralyzing. Know which one you are before you apply.

You’ll be a strong fit if you:

• Are decisive when there’s no clean answer. You hold context on both sides and make judgment calls constantly. Sometimes that means telling the customer not now, sometimes it means escalating to the roadmap. You don’t wait for someone to tell you which one.

• Have instinctual taste for what a good patient experience sounds like. You notice the thing that’s slightly wrong and then you can’t unknow it. You care about how that conversation feels to the person on the other end, not just whether it’s technically completed.

• Don’t mind breadth. This role requires you to be effective across a wide surface area: customer context, product judgment, hands-on implementation, prototype building—often within the same hour. If you’d rather go deep on one hard technical problem and be left alone, the SWE role might be a better fit. If switching contexts is where you do your best work, this one’s for you.

• Are honest about what you don’t know. “You might have a point; I may be wrong” should be something you’ve said recently and meant. We debate, we disagree, we challenge each other, but we do it with respect and with the assumption of good intent. Someone who can’t say they’re wrong won’t last long here, and frankly won’t enjoy it much either.

• Don’t think unglamorous work is beneath you. Everyone rotates through the mundane stuff, no matter their seniority. The people who are great here do it without making it a thing.

You shouldn’t apply if you’ve never owned a project without someone assigning the tickets, or if you need a detailed roadmap to feel grounded.

The Team

Our honest assessment: this team skews high EQ. (Maybe too high. We probably need more shoelace staring.) But it’s also what makes working here feel different from most engineering environments: people genuinely like each other, go climbing together, form bands, bake for each other. The culture isn’t declared. It’s just what happens when you hire people you actually want to spend time with.

• Sumedh is our VP of Engineering who joined because he’d been watching what we were building and couldn’t stay on the sidelines. He’s senior enough to mentor everyone, but humble enough that nobody feels mentored. Also inexplicably West Coast for an East Coast guy.

• Mimu joined a month ago and has already built a Claude onboarding agent that turns customer docs and meeting transcripts into a configured agent, shrinking implementation time from 5 days to 2 hours. In his spare time he’s building a 3D printed clock. (The clock was not on anyone’s roadmap.)

• Tyrone commutes from Berkeley by bike every day, which is either impressive or unhinged depending on how you feel about the Bay Bridge. He loves climbing and will invite every new hire to go with him.

• Tom runs Customer Success and will be your closest partner here. We took him to a client in Orlando once and they said it was the smoothest IT implementation they’d ever experienced (because: Tom). He’s technical enough to dig into a problem before passing it to engineering, funny enough to defuse a tense customer call, and somehow finds time to win Tuesday night softball championships. He also has a dachshund named Wanda who is, by any measurable metric, our most effective marketing asset.

• Jung (co-founder, CEO) was patient number one at One Medical: he helped the founder build the first financial model before the practice had a single location. He also built the compliance program there from scratch, which is why we're already SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant. He has a PhD in operations research, which means the person running ops here thinks like an engineer. On the weekends you can find him at the farmers market selling kimchi in honor of his mother.

• Eric (co-founder, CPO) was my college classmate, and we played on the same rec league basketball team before we decided to build together. He was working in ML/NLP before ChatGPT existed, which means he knew this business was possible before most people were even asking the question. Eric’s the reason we’re building in healthcare specifically… but I’ll let him tell you that story.

• Me (Aaron, co-founder, CTO): Eric and I have been friends since before any of this existed. I think the best thing I can say about what it’s like to work with me is that he’s still here.

Requirements

2-5 years of engineering experience. Comfort working across the full stack: you don’t need to be a specialist, but you need to be able to move fast across frontend, backend, and integrations. Experience with Python is a plus. More important than any specific technology: you’ve shipped real things, you’ve talked to the people using them, and you’ve made judgment calls without waiting for someone to define the problem for you.

Interview Process

We move quickly: you’ll hear back within 48 hours after each round. This can be as fast as two weeks end-to-end.

1. 30-minute founder intro call

2. 1-hour technical phone screen: you’ll problem-solve through an evolving technical challenge

3. Full-day onsite in San Francisco. We’ll work through real customer problems together.

4. Reference checks → Offer

Benefits

• Excellent health, dental, and vision insurance

• Free dinner

• Espresso machine (pull your own shots)

• Gourmet snacks and lots of Diet Cokes

• Fitness stipend

• Commuter benefits

• Unlimited PTO

• 401(k)

• Relocation stipend

Our Office (The Nest)

In-person, Downtown SF by Montgomery BART. After years of remote work, we wanted to be in the same room again to brainstorm, whiteboard, and actually enjoy each other’s company. There’s high ownership, no BS meetings, and a ton of gourmet snacks. Once a week we also get out of the office for a team lunch… because some of the best conversations happen away from the whiteboards.

Include a 🦜 in your application for extra credit.

- Aaron, Co-founder & CTO