Founding Support/Success Engineer

Artificer Health - Remote (US hours required)

Why this role exists

Prior authorization is a system designed to slow things down. Payers built it that way. The result is that practice managers, billing coordinators, and front desk staff spend somewhere between 13 and 16 hours a week on a process that should take minutes - chasing fax confirmations, re-submitting denied requests, leaving voicemails that never get returned, and documenting every step in case someone asks later. Meanwhile, patients wait.

We're building Artificer Health to end that. Not improve it. End it.

We're pre-revenue, early, and deliberately small. Our first EHR integration is athenahealth. We're onboarding pilot clinics now and what we do with them - how we treat them, how fast we fix things, how honestly we communicate - will determine whether this company works or doesn't.

That's why this role exists. Not because we need a ticket queue managed. Because we need someone who will own the relationship between Artificer and every clinic we work with, make sure those clinics are genuinely better off for having us, and come back to the product and engineering team with the truth about what's happening in the field.

This is a founding seat. You won't inherit a playbook. You'll write it.

What you'll actually do

Hold the line on clinic relationships. You are the primary point of contact for every practice we work with. Practice managers, billing coordinators, front desk leads - these are people who are already stretched thin and have been burned before by software that promised to help and made things worse. They need to know someone at Artificer has their back. That someone is you.

Work support and success simultaneously. You'll handle inbound issues - bugs, integration errors, submission failures, user confusion - and you'll proactively check in on clinics before problems surface. Both matter equally. Waiting for someone to complain before you engage is not how we operate.

Read the technical layer. You won't write code, but you need to understand how our system works end to end: how we pull data from athenahealth, how authorization requests are built and submitted, what a failed API call looks like, how to read an error log and figure out whether the problem is on our side or the payer's. Engineers should be able to hand you a Slack thread, a log snippet, or a support ticket and trust you to triage it without a translator.

Be the feedback loop. Every conversation with a clinic is a product signal. You'll capture what's breaking, what's confusing, what's missing entirely, and what clinics try to do that we haven't accounted for. You'll synthesize that into something actionable and bring it to product and engineering with enough context that they can actually use it.

Build the infrastructure for support and success. Define the onboarding process for new clinics. Build the success metrics we'll track. Write the internal runbooks. Set up the tooling. Decide what "a great first 90 days with Artificer" looks like for a practice and make sure every clinic has that experience.

Carry things until they're done. When something breaks or a clinic is frustrated, your name stays on it. Not until it's escalated. Not until it's logged. Until it's resolved. That's not a performance requirement - it's a values requirement.

What you bring

Healthcare operations knowledge. You understand prior authorization from the inside. You know what a peer-to-peer review is, why a retro auth is different from a prospective one, how appeals work, what a PA denial reason code means. You've worked in healthcare - medical billing, revenue cycle, practice operations, clinical settings - or you've spent enough time supporting those teams that you know their world.

Technical comfort without being an engineer. You've worked with SaaS products that integrate with other systems. You're not intimidated by an API error or a JSON payload. You know how to search a log, use a REST client to test a call, and distinguish between a configuration issue and a software bug. You ask engineers the right questions.

The ability to talk to anyone. A billing coordinator who's been on hold with a payer for 45 minutes and then hits a problem with our software is not in a patient mood. You can de-escalate, communicate clearly, and make someone feel like they're being taken seriously - without false promises or corporate detachment.

A bias toward action. You don't sit on things. When something's unclear, you ask. When something's broken, you start working the problem before someone assigns it to you. When you don't know the answer, you say so, find it, and follow up.

Plain language. You write clearly. Your updates to clinics and your internal summaries to the team are short, specific, and honest. You don't use passive voice to obscure bad news. You don't hide behind process language.

Independence. We're small. There's no one above you in a customer success org to ask for guidance on every decision. You'll have access to Bobby and the rest of the team, but you need to be comfortable operating without constant oversight and making judgment calls in real time.

Curiosity about how things actually work. If you've ever read a patio11 essay about the hidden complexity inside some mundane-sounding system and thought "this is exactly why nothing works the way people think it does" - that instinct is what makes someone good at this job. Prior auth is one of those systems.

What we bring

Equity and a seat at the table. This is a founding role. You'll have equity, direct input into how the company operates, and visibility into every meaningful decision we make. Your feedback will change the product. Your judgment will shape how we scale.

A problem worth solving. Prior authorization causes measurable harm - to patients who wait, to clinicians who spend time on paperwork instead of care, to practice staff who are grinding through a broken system every day. If that doesn't bother you, this probably isn't the right fit. If it does, you'll know that the work you do here matters.

Directness. No politics. No internal performance theater. No feedback withheld until a review cycle. You'll hear the truth about how things are going and we expect the same from you.

A company that stays small on purpose. We are not building a 300-person organization. We're building a lean, durable product company. That means your role will evolve, your responsibilities will grow, and you'll have room to become something more than a ticket-handler - but you'll never be buried in bureaucracy.

Remote, with real flexibility. You need to be available during US business hours to support clinics and coordinate with the team. Within that, how you structure your day is yours to manage.

How to apply

Send an email to [email protected].

Skip the cover letter template. Tell us: what's broken about prior authorization from where you've sat, what you'd want to fix first if you were in this seat, and why you're not already doing it somewhere else. If you've built something - a support process, an onboarding playbook, a system that worked - tell us what it was and what you learned from it.

We move fast. If there's a fit, you'll know within a week.