Forward Deployed Engineer - AI Consultant

Embedded Operator Role

You are an embedded operator who bridges frontier AI methodology and production-grade operational reality inside healthcare organizations. Unlike traditional advisory work, you do not stop at slideware and recommendations. You run our four-week AI Jumpstart Discovery cycle end to end — kickoff, department-by-department stakeholder interviews, executive prioritization workshop, final readout — and you ship a prioritized opportunity portfolio, current-state and future-state process models, ROI math, and a 90-day execution plan that the client's CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, or CMIO will fund and act on.

You are the high-agency owner of the engagement. The methodology is documented, the AI deliverable pipeline is built, and the back-office team that operates it is in place. What we need is the senior practitioner who can sit in the room with healthcare executives, earn their trust, and convert ambiguous operational pain into a concrete, fundable roadmap. You can expect to travel up to 30% of the time for this position.

The Forward Deployed Engineer title in 2026 covers a wide spectrum, from contractors writing agentic code inside a customer's runtime to AI-focused consultants running discovery and integration engagements. PTM sits firmly on the consultant-architect end of that spectrum, and we are explicit about it.

You will: embed inside client operations for the duration of a Discovery engagement, lead structured interviews, facilitate workshops, direct PTM's four-agent transcript-to-roadmap pipeline, quality-assure every deliverable that goes to the client, and own the relationship from kickoff through Statement of Work for the implementation phase.

You will not: write production software that ships inside the client's runtime. We have a Fusion Development practice that does that. Discovery is upstream of build, and you are the senior practitioner on the Discovery side.

If you came into the FDE category hoping to write code at a customer's desk, this is not that job. If you came into it because you want to be the person who turns boardroom anxiety about AI into a concrete, ROI-defensible roadmap inside a real healthcare operation — and you want to do it at a firm with documented methodology, working AI tooling, and an implementation team standing behind the scope you write — this is exactly the job.

You do not need software engineering experience. You do need fluency in how healthcare operations actually run. We expect you to have led work in two or more of these areas:

• Hospital or health-system operations: admissions, scheduling, OR throughput, length of stay, transfers, capacity management.
• Revenue cycle: intake, eligibility and benefits, prior authorization, charge capture, coding, denials, AR follow-up, patient financial services.
• Clinical workflow and documentation: provider documentation burden, order management, clinical messaging, care coordination, post-acute handoffs.
• Payer operations: claims adjudication, utilization management, provider data, appeals.
• Healthcare IT advisory: EHR-adjacent integration, interoperability, HIE, HL7 / FHIR-aware workflow design.

You understand HIPAA, PHI handling, and the practical line between operational data and protected data. You have sat across from a CMIO, a VP of Revenue Cycle, or a COO and earned the right to ask hard questions.

You can do the following without being told:

• Walk into a kickoff with twelve unfamiliar stakeholders and end the hour with their trust.
• Hear the difference between "we are frustrated by X" and "X costs us $4M a year." Pull the second from people who only said the first.
• Write an executive summary the CEO will actually read — one page, plain language, clear recommendation.
• Disagree with a senior client respectfully and productively when their proposed pilot is the wrong starting point.
• Run a workshop where seven department heads with conflicting priorities reach a ranked list everyone can defend.
• Own scope. No one will hand you a spec, and scope ambiguity is yours to resolve. If an engagement does not ship its roadmap on day 30, that is your problem.

PTM's Fusion methodology is opinionated. You will not need to invent it. In your first 60 days we train you on:

• The Discovery Covenant — pain-first thesis, Digital Assembly Line model, our writing standard.
• The structured interview guide — question library, event-storming protocol, BPMN style.
• The four-agent deliverable pipeline — what it produces, what your Product Analyst partner does, how to QA every stage.
• Deliverable templates — Solution Architecture Document, Solution Design Document, milestone roadmap, Statement of Work, with ROI and KPI framing.
• The implementation handoff — how Discovery feeds Fusion Development and how we keep continuity for the client.

You leave cross-training able to run a Discovery engagement solo, with Product Analyst support and Practice Lead review.