Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

ABOUT PROSPER AI Prosper is building the most advanced conversational AI agents for healthcare — human-like phone agents that handle the administrative work draining the system: claims status checks, benefit verification, prior authorizations, patient scheduling, and balance reminders. Our mission is to eliminate $200B in administrative waste so healthcare professionals can focus more on healing and less on paperwork. Headquartered in New York with an office in Barcelona, we work with dozens of large and enterprise healthcare organizations, and we've raised $35M from top investors including a16z, Base10, YC, and Emergence. We're a highly motivated team of 20 — ex-MIT, HBS, Bain, and Math/CS/Physics olympiad medalists — and as we prepare for our next stage of growth, we're looking for ambitious, exceptionally talented people to help scale our product and grow with us. WHAT YOU'LL DO At Prosper, we're pushing the limits of what's possible with real-time AI. We're not just making voice agents that "talk" — we're engineering systems that sound human, reason under strong latency constraints, and integrate seamlessly with our customers' complex internal tools. As Lead Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll be both a hands-on builder and the leader of our FDE function — setting the technical direction, shaping how the team works, and growing the engineers on it, while still shipping code yourself. This is a player-coach role: roughly half your time is IC work on the hardest client and platform problems, and half is leading the people, process, and technical standards of the FDE area. Day to day, you'll: - Lead and grow the FDE team — manage a group of Forward Deployed Engineers, owning their growth, performance, hiring, and day-to-day direction, and building a high-trust, high-ownership culture. - Set the technical direction for the FDE area — define the architecture, patterns, and best practices for how we deploy, integrate, and optimize agents across clients, and make sure the team builds reusable solutions instead of one-off fixes. - Own the FDE process — establish how the team scopes client work, prioritizes across competing deadlines, handles on-call and incidents, and feeds learnings back into the core product. - Stay hands-on — personally take on the most ambitious or highest-stakes work: complex integrations, performance bottlenecks, and live debugging of agents making thousands of daily phone calls. - Be the technical face for key clients — partner directly with our most important healthcare customers from onboarding through optimization, translating their workflows into agent behavior that works in production. - Tune and optimize voice agents — guide the team's work on LLM prompting, voice and transcription configuration, and conversation logic to make agents sound human and perform reliably under real-time latency constraints. - Partner with PMs and Engineering leadership — work closely with AI PMs and the core engineering team to align the FDE roadmap with product strategy and surface patterns across clients. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR - Strong software engineering background, with experience leading projects or teams (formal management experience is a plus, but we care more about demonstrated technical leadership). - Solid understanding of the technologies that power our stack or their equivalents: FastAPI (Python) + PostgreSQL backend with a React (TypeScript) frontend. - Experience working closely with clients and finding creative solutions to their needs. - Familiarity with LLMs, AI agents, or other ML models. - Comfortable balancing hands-on IC work with people management and process ownership — you're energized by both. - Founder mindset: ownership + hard work. You're excited to build and lead a function from an early stage. - Ready to handle the challenges of supporting AI voice agents making thousands of daily phone calls. - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Maths, Physics, or related field (o