1 in 4 people in the US have a treatable mental health condition, but most providers don't accept insurance, making therapy too expensive for most people. Headway’s mission is to fix this by building a new mental healthcare system everyone can access. We started by solving the biggest barrier to care: insurance. The admin work - credentialing, claims, payment reconciliation - is a nightmare. We've automated that.

But we're going further. Over 90,000 providers across all 50 states run their practice on our software, serving over 2.6 million patients. We are building the best tools for therapists to run their entire practice, reimagining the experience of finding a therapist, and investing in the platform foundations to enable this at scale, and building much of it with AI. We aren't just a billing layer; we are becoming the platform where care actually happens.

We're a Series D company with $325M+ in funding (a16z, Accel, Spark Capital, etc.), looking for exceptional people to help us achieve this mission. We want your time here to be the most meaningful experience of your career. Join us, and help change mental healthcare for the better.

About engineering at Headway

Building a new mental healthcare system at Headway is only possible because of the scale and leverage that software can provide. The engineering team at Headway is a small but mighty team using technology to build that future (and have a fun time while doing it!).

Principles that guide us

Focus on the mission: We view software as a means of effecting change in the world, not as an end unto itself. We write software to empower our patients and therapists to better solve the problems they're facing.

Ship small, learn fast: We are building new and novel products and believe that we learn what our users need by quickly shipping and iterating.

Everything is a product: Whether it's our patient search experience or a developer productivity improvement, we treat everything we build at Headway as a product with end-users in mind.

Optimize for trust: We believe that engineers should be continually learning. To learn effectively and to be productive, engineers must feel safe asking questions and discussing mistakes.

Tools we use

Languages: Python 3, TypeScript

Libraries & Frameworks: FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, React, Remix, Next.js

Datastores: Postgres, Redis

Infrastructure: AWS (Fargate, ECS, S3, SageMaker and more), Spark and Kafka

Monitoring: Datadog, PagerDuty, Sentry

Version Control: Github

Vulnerability Management: Snyk, Semgrep

Cloud Security: Lacework

About this role

Headway's mission is to build a new mental healthcare system that everyone can access. The data we hold to do that is some of the most sensitive there is: what someone said in therapy. Data Safety is the team that makes it possible to learn from that data without putting the people in it at risk.

As Engineering Manager for Data Safety, you'll lead that team. Protecting patient data is Headway's first priority, ahead of any roadmap, and that is not a slogan here: it is the constraint every other team designs around. Your job is to turn that constraint into something people can build on rather than something they route around.

The upside is enormous. With tens of thousands of providers and millions of sessions, Headway holds what is very likely the richest picture of real mental health care anywhere in the world. Remarkably little is known at scale about which care helps whom, and we are sitting on the data that could answer it. The blocker has never been curiosity, it is having a safe way in.

The core of that is de-identification: removing the person from the record while keeping the clinical signal, and getting the method certified so the whole company can rely on it. You'll grow and mentor a team of roughly five to eight engineers, set the roadmap for the pod, and work closely with Security, Legal, Compliance, Data, and the product teams that depend on you.

The bar is high. We have to be able to stand behind how we handle this data to a regulator, to a payer, and to the patient it came from. Get that right and what your team ships sets the ceiling on how much Headway can learn, and on how many people we can help.