Forward Deployed Engineer

About Soulside
Soulside AI is transforming how behavioral health organizations operate, unlocking massive efficiency gains through AI. Our platform cuts documentation time by 80%—turning 3+ hours of daily paperwork into 30 minutes—so these organizations can focus resources on patient care, growth, and innovation. The impact is immediate: better outcomes, reduced costs, and the ability to serve more patients without adding administrative overhead.
We're scaling fast and building the infrastructure that will power mental healthcare for decades. This is your chance to join as a founding engineer and shape a platform that every behavioral health organization will depend on.

Our momentum speaks for itself:
✅ Backed by Counterpart Ventures, GreyMatter Capital, Sarah Smith Fund & Kaya Ventures
✅ UCSF Rosenman Healthtech Innovator 2024
✅ OneMind Accelerator 2024 & PeakXV Spark Program
✅ Global Top 10 – Confluent Data Streaming Challenge

The Role
We're looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to work directly with behavioral health organizations and turn real-world clinical workflows into production software.
This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer implementation. You'll help customers go from kickoff → live while shaping the core platform that powers mental healthcare delivery at scale. You'll be embedded with clinicians, operations leaders, and IT teams at our customers—translating the messy reality of behavioral health operations into elegant, scalable product.
As an early engineering hire, you'll have outsized impact on our technical architecture, product direction, and customer experience, with significant equity upside and the autonomy to make decisions that will scale with our growth.

What You'll Do
Work directly with behavioral health organizations during onboarding and implementation, from kickoff to go-live
Translate clinical and operational workflows—intake, assessment, treatment planning, billing, compliance—into scalable Soulside product features
Build integrations with customer EHRs, practice management systems, and clinical data sources
Extend the platform to support complex clinical documentation, coding, and reporting workflows
Identify product gaps surfaced during deployments and collaborate with product and engineering to close them
Own customer-facing technical outcomes end-to-end, from first integration call to production rollout
Establish patterns and tooling that make future deployments faster and more repeatable

Who You Are
Customer-Obsessed Engineer: You're energized by sitting with users, watching how they actually work, and turning that into shipped software. You see customer calls as the highest-leverage part of your week, not an interruption.
Systems Thinker: You naturally reason about distributed systems, integrations, and data consistency—and you design for what goes wrong, not just what goes right.
Resourceful Problem Solver: You can architect smart solutions when faced with complex, non-standard healthcare workflows, legacy systems, and ambiguous requirements.
Ownership Mindset: You're happy to own a deployment end-to-end—architecture, code, customer communication, and the operational details that keep production systems running.

Required Qualifications
2+ years of software engineering experience
Strong backend or ML/AI background, with experience shipping production software
Comfort working directly with customers and ambiguous problems—turning conversations into specs into code
Experience building integrations with third-party APIs and data sources
Hands-on experience with LLM technologies including prompt engineering and production AI pipelines
Excellent written and verbal communication—you can explain technical tradeoffs to clinicians and clinical realities to engineers
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced startup environment with high ownership

Bonus Points
Experience with healthcare data standards (HL7, FHIR, CCDA) or EHR integrations
HIPAA compliance experience
Background in customer-facing engineering, solutions engineering, or technical implementation roles
Experience with data pipelines, document ingestion, or OCR systems
Audio/signal processing experience
Familiarity with Spring Boot, Kafka, AWS, or our broader stack
CS degree or equivalent experience

Stack
Backend: Spring Boot, Java
Streaming & Async: Kafka, SQS, Kinesis
Data: Postgres, distributed data stores
Infra: AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS), Terraform
Observability: Prometheus, Grafana
AI: LLM foundation models, custom prompt and evaluation pipelines

What We Offer
Significant equity package with high upside potential as a early team member
Competitive salary commensurate with senior engineering roles
Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
Flexible work arrangements with remote-first culture
Direct access to founders and influence on company direction
Professional development budget and conference attendance
Modern tech stack and complete autonomy over technical decisions
Opportunity to build something meaningful that impacts mental health at scale

How to Apply
Send us your resume along with a brief note about what excites you about this role. We'd particularly love to hear about a time you worked directly with users to ship something, any experience you have with integrations or AI systems in production, and why behavioral health is a problem you'd want to spend the next several years solving.
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