Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)

About Wilco

Wilco is building the fastest path from Lead to Cash for retail healthcare. We get the patient in clinic by deploying AI Voice, WhatsApp, SMS and Email Agents that convert leads into appointments, reactivate lost patients, confirm bookings, and get unclosed quotes signed. 24/7.

We work with healthcare groups across Europe. We are growing quickly, and every new customer brings real operational workflows, integrations and edge cases that need to work reliably in production.

The role

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to own the technical success of our customers after the contract is signed.

You will work directly with clinic operations teams to understand how they actually work, then design and ship the workflows they need across voice, WhatsApp, booking systems, CRMs and the Wilco platform. A customer may ask Wilco to recover leads by voice, change how a journey handles a specific outcome, or connect to a system with incomplete documentation. You will take that from an ambiguous request to a reliable production flow.

This is a software engineering role, not presales or customer support. You will write production code, join customer conversations, debug real integrations and contribute reusable improvements to the core Wilco platform.

What you will do

• Own customer deployments and workflows from discovery through design, implementation, testing, launch and iteration.
• Work directly with customer operators and technical teams, turning messy real-world processes into clear system behaviour.
• Build full-stack functionality, with most backend work in Python and integrations across APIs, webhooks, data stores and third-party services.
• Create and evolve AI voice and messaging journeys, including prompts, tools, business rules, fallbacks and evaluations.
• Diagnose production issues across systems you do not fully control and communicate clearly until the customer outcome is restored.
• Make good calls about what should remain bespoke, what should become a reusable module and what belongs in the core platform.
• Feed recurring customer needs and failure patterns back into Product and Engineering so Wilco does not solve the same problem repeatedly.
• Contribute to the core platform with appropriate boundaries, tests and review rather than customer-specific shortcuts.
• Use coding agents such as Claude Code or Codex as part of your daily engineering workflow while remaining accountable for architecture, verification and production quality.

What we are looking for

• Evidence that you have shipped production software, ideally across both backend and frontend systems.
• Strong Python fundamentals and comfort reading unfamiliar code. Experience with TypeScript or React is useful.
• Experience integrating APIs and external systems, including imperfect or poorly documented ones.
• Good product judgment: you look for the underlying user problem, not only the literal feature request.
• Clear, calm communication with technical and non-technical people. You should genuinely enjoy working with customers.
• High agency. You can take an unclear outcome, identify the missing information and drive it to completion.
• A rigorous AI-first workflow. You can show how you use coding agents to explore, plan, implement, test and review work—not only generate code faster.
• Professional English.

Strong advantages

• Spanish or Portuguese. Most of our current customers are in Spain.
• Experience with voice AI, WhatsApp, telephony, healthcare workflows, CRMs or scheduling systems.
• Experience with LLM applications, agent tools, prompt/evaluation systems or workflow orchestration.
• Early-stage startup, consulting, implementation or other customer-facing engineering experience.
• Familiarity with Docker, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD and production observability.

What success looks like

In your first 90 days, you will have shipped a customer workflow to production, established a trusted working relationship with its users, and left the Wilco platform more reusable than you found it.

Within 12 months, you will own several customer workstreams and will have converted repeated bespoke needs into tested platform capabilities that make the next deployment faster.

How we work

Wilco is office-first in Lisbon because this role depends on rapid collaboration with Product, Engineering and customer teams. There is flexibility to work from home on some days.

We use AI deeply across engineering. We value people who can increase their own leverage with coding agents while keeping a high bar for reasoning, security, testing and maintainability.

What we offer

• €30.000–€40.000 gross annual base salary.
• Full-time Portuguese employment contract.
• Flexible compensation with meal allowance.
• Office in Lisbon with hybrid flexibility.
• Direct customer and product ownership at an early-stage company.