Forward Deployed Software Engineer

This role may require you to travel to Sydney, Canberra, UAE, and All Across India (especially to Hyderabad, Noida).

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Pensieve builds software for private and government hospitals. We are building it as a deep-technology institution, with the software engineering rigor that has never been done before in medicine. The systems underneath are formally specified and machine-checked, access is controlled to a fine grain, and correctness is treated as a first-order requirement.

Pensieve builds the software system for hospital operations and clinical records for hospitals, and patients. A modern hospital is one of the most data-rich environments on earth. Data ranges across vitals streaming from bedside monitors, admissions and transfers firing every minute, lab results, imaging studies, clinical notes, orders, theatre schedules, and staffing rosters. A minor glitch in the software can result in delayed discharges, missed deterioration, overcrowded emergency departments, and unavoidable harm.

We build software for the institutions that never close, where reliability is not a metric: it is a duty.

• Forward Deployed Engineers are the people who take Pensieve out of our offices and into live hospital environments. You own the deployment of Pensieve inside a hospital from start to finish, and you are the technical bridge between a hospital’s real problems and what our platform can do about them.
• As an FDE you do not write the application software that makes up the Pensieve product itself. Your job is to understand a hospital’s clinical and operational problems at a deep technical level, work out precisely how Pensieve can solve each of them, and then integrate, model, configure, and deploy the platform so that it does. You are judged by whether the hospital’s problems actually get solved and whether the deployment holds up in the real world.
• You will spend a lot of time physically inside hospitals, sitting with clinicians and operations staff, watching how care is delivered, how managerial operations are run in a hospital, and tracing exactly where information breaks down, and how it can be solved by Pensieve. Real medicine is messy, high-stakes, and unforgiving, and none of it can be understood from a desk. This is a role for someone who is technically strong and comfortable taking ownership of ambiguous, mission-critical problems in an environment where the stakes are patient lives.

• Forward Deployed Engineers at Pensieve may be offered the opportunity to join Rounds. In medicine, rounds are how a care team sees every patient where they actually are. At Pensieve, Rounds embeds you directly inside partner hospitals, alongside the clinicians, bed managers, ward clerks, and operations leaders who rely on our software every hour of every day. Unlike a traditional engineering assignment, Rounds drops you into complex, ambiguous, high-stakes problems and empowers you to deliver solutions that matter across some of the world’s most important institutions.
• Our most notable improvements in Pensieve were done after our engineers spent a significant amount of time observing the real scenarios in hospitals, addressing real problems for real institutions under real pressure. Pensieve is developed by engineers who began close to the work, gaining a deep understanding of both our technology and the people who use it.
• Our engineers experience very diverse and impactful scenarios. By witnessing how hospitals actually engage with Pensieve, and by feeling those pain points firsthand, you gain unique insight that feeds directly back into how we build, helping refine and strengthen our product.
• Every hospital deployment follows a recognisable arc, and as an FDE you move through it the way a clinician moves through rounds: repeatedly, attentively, and with ownership of everything you find along the way.

• You work with Pensieve’s Alpha team and the hospital’s own team to understand where the pain actually is. You map the hospital’s workflows, its existing systems, its data, and the specific operational and clinical failures that cost it time, money, and safety. You break each problem down until you understand it at a technical level.
• You communicate and demonstrate to the hospital teams what problems they have, and how Pensieve is going to solve them.
• You take ownership of standing Pensieve up inside the hospital. This covers integrating with existing systems, modelling the hospital’s operations and data inside the platform, configuring the workflows people will use, validating that the data is correct, and adapting everything to how the hospital genuinely runs rather than how it is supposed to run on paper.
• You lead the go-live, which we call ‘First Light’. You are the person on the floor when the platform goes into real use, ready to respond the moment reality diverges from the plan.
• Next to the Customer Support team, you remain the escalation point for the hospital. At Pensieve, support is engineering. When an issue is escalated, the person who picks it up is an engineer who understands the deployment and can actually fix it.
• Own hospital deployments from first discovery, through First Light, and into stable, trusted production use.
• Take ownership as the first responder when something goes wrong. Even when a problem sits outside your area of expertise, you make the first move to fix it and coordinate whoever is needed to close it out.

• TypeScript is the main language. The work also reaches into Python, C, C++, Go, Java and Rust.
• Distributed systems technologies such as Kafka and Elasticsearch.
• Healthcare interoperability standards including HL7 v2.x, FHIR R4, and DICOM, together with clinical terminologies such as SNOMED CT, LOINC, and ICD-10.
• Docker and Kubernetes for containerisation and orchestration.
• Industry-standard build tooling, including GitHub and GitLab.
• Engineering practices aligned to India’s digital health ecosystem, including ABDM interoperability and DPDP Act data-protection requirements.
• Most of the cloud services required by Pensieve are on Google Cloud Platform, with some on AWS.
• Data engineering and transformation, including building and debugging batch and streaming pipelines, and frameworks such as Spark.

• Strong systems thinking, and the ability to reason clearly about how data moves through a complex, interconnected environment, where it can break, and what happens when it does.
• The ability to take a vague, tangled, real-world clinical or operational problem and decompose it into a precise technical problem that can actually be solved.
• Enough fluency reading, writing, and debugging code and queries to investigate issues across the stack, even though you are not shipping the product’s application software.
• Solid data modelling instincts, and comfort representing messy real-world entities and relationships in a structured platform.
• Real facility with integration and interoperability, including moving and reconciling data between systems that disagree about formats, semantics, and reality itself.
• The ability to debug unfamiliar systems under pressure: form a hypothesis, test it, and drive to root cause rather than stopping at symptoms.
• Excellent technical communication, so that you can be precise with other software engineers and clear with clinicians and administrators on the same day.
• The ability to learn continuously and operate independently, making sound technical decisions with minimal supervision in fast-moving, ambiguous conditions.

• A background in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or another STEM field, or equivalent practical experience in a technical or engineering role.
• A demonstrated ability to reason about problems technically and to work with data, systems, and code.
• Proficiency with one or more programming languages or data engineering frameworks, such as Python, SQL, Spark, Java, C++, or TypeScript and JavaScript.
• Strong problem-solving ability and the resourcefulness to own difficult, ambiguous problems from start to finish.
• Willingness to be regularly present on-site in hospitals and to work around the realities of live medicine, including go-lives that do not always land at convenient hours.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical people.

We care about skills and mindset far more than a specific educational background. Our team includes people who studied computer science, people who came from healthcare or operations, people who went through a bootcamp, people who joined straight out of university, and people who switched industries to build this with us.

• Experience integrating with hospital or clinical systems such as HIS, EMR or EHR, LIS, RIS, or PACS.
• Experience deploying or operating software in regulated, clinical, or otherwise high-stakes environments.
• Experience with data-intensive applications development and maintenance.
• Prior experience in a forward deployed, field, solutions, or deployment engineering role.
• Familiarity with healthcare data and interoperability standards such as HL7 v2, FHIR, or DICOM.
• Exposure to distributed systems, data reliability, or observability in production.
• Domain knowledge of hospital operations, clinical workflows, or healthcare more broadly.

This role is hybrid and based across India, Australia and the UAE, with travel to hospital sites wherever our deployments are. You should expect to spend a meaningful part of your time physically on-site in hospitals, because that is where the problems are and where the real work happens. When you are not on-site you can work remotely as per your choice, but you will be required to come to our notified cluster office whenever required. We notify you about it in advance.

• The estimated salary range for this position is ₹60,00,000 to ₹1,10,00,000 per year. Total compensation may also include equity, a sign-on bonus, and other future incentives.
• Final compensation is determined by each individual’s qualifications, experience, skills, and other relevant factors. The range above excludes the value of any sign-on bonus, the value of any benefits offered, and the future value of any long-term equity.
• Comprehensive medical insurance for employees and their eligible dependents, covering outpatient care, dental, and vision.
• Group term life, personal accident, and disability cover, provided automatically to every employee.
• Relocation assistance for you and your family if required.
• Two weeks of paid time off at the time of Deepawali, subject to team and business needs.
• Ten paid holidays across the calendar year.
• A supportive leave of absence program, including time off for medical events and other significant life circumstances.
• Paid leave for new parents.

At Pensieve, we ensure that every person does their best while we take care of their overall well-being. From your first conversation with us through every stage of your growth, we recognise and build on individual strengths, skills, and interests rather than routing everyone through a single career ladder. Staying attentive to the needs of our community lets us create many pathways to success at Pensieve, and a sustained commitment to the health and wellbeing of our people, across every dimension of their lives, is among the most important of them.

Consistent with our belief that people are better together, we value in-person work for the creativity, trust, and momentum it makes possible, and we encourage our teams to spend meaningful time together in our offices to strengthen both connection and craft. Though we generally offer hybrid arrangements, we encourage our teams to come together frequently.

If you want to change how healthcare works for the institutions and patients who depend on it, you belong here. Pensieve values excellence regardless of background, and we are proud to be an equal-opportunity employer for all, including persons with disabilities, in keeping with the spirit of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016. We are committed to keeping our application and hiring process accessible to everyone, and we will provide reasonable accommodation to candidates living with a disability. If you need an accommodation at any point in the process, please reach out and tell us how we can support you.

Pensieve will never ask you to make a payment or share financial information to take part in our interview process. If you believe you have been contacted by someone impersonating Pensieve, we recommend that you cease all communication with them and consider reporting the matter to the authorities. In India, incidents can be reported through the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal at cybercrime.gov.in or by calling the national cyber-fraud helpline on 1930.

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