The ad says“3+ years of engineering management experience at a high-growth startup or scale-up”
The ad says“Final rounds: You’ll meet team members across product and engineering leadership for multiple behavioral interviews and one more technical interview (System Design), leaving you with a fuller picture of what it’s like to work at Headway”
Values
The ad says“Nice to have: prior experience with Python, React, and AWS infrastructure”
The ad says“Nice to have: prior experience with Python, React, and AWS infrastructure”
The ad says“Nice to have: prior experience with Python, React, and AWS infrastructure”
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!)
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
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
Headway’s mission is to build a new mental healthcare system that everyone can access. We have built the largest insurance-based therapy network in the country, and the insurers paying for it are now asking two fair questions: is it working, and is it worth it? Network Value is the team that answers the second one
At the risk of oversimplifying it, you could describe the problem as one shoe, one size, one price. Sessions differ enormously in what they involve and in how much they help, and yet they are largely paid for as though they were the same thing
That is not carelessness on anyone’s part. Patients, providers and insurers have all been working without the data that would let them be more specific, and producing that data honestly is genuinely hard
As Engineering Manager for Network Value, you’ll lead the team closing that gap: understanding our patients and our providers far better than we do today, using that to match them well, and turning the result into evidence an insurer will accept
The nuance is the job. The differences that matter are real but subtle, and being crude about them has consequences for providers’ livelihoods and patients’ care
You’ll grow and mentor a team of roughly five to eight engineers, set the roadmap for the pod, and work closely with Product, Clinical, Data, and the people who sit across the table from payers
Get this right and the same money buys better care. Get it crudely wrong and we either keep paying for care that did not help, or we penalise providers who were doing the right thing all along. Holding both of those at once is the real difficulty of the role, and the reason it needs a strong leader
You’ll work closely with Engineering Leadership, Product, Clinical, and Data to shape the future of Headway’s payer strategy
There is an unusually direct line from your team’s work to the rates we can defend, and to whether this model of care survives contact with the market
Lead, manage, and grow the Network Value engineering team
Own delivery on externally-committed launches and metrics, including their guardrails
Set the technical and operational roadmap across segmentation, provider efficiency ranking, and subnetworks
Develop your team through weekly 1:1s, mentorship, and direct feedback, and grow a tech-lead layer beneath you
Partner closely with Product, Clinical, Data Science, and Commercial to iterate quickly and rigorously
Contribute to the broader group and company strategy, not just your own roadmap
You’ll love this role if you want to:
Lead the team that decides whether a new model of mental healthcare can be shown to be worth it, not just described
Own launches and numbers the company commits to externally, with the autonomy that comes with it
Build a tech-lead layer beneath you rather than inherit a finished team
Preferred experience
We’re looking for an engineering leader who is product-minded, data-informed, and energized by growth
3+ years of engineering management experience at a high-growth startup or scale-up
A track record of building and leading high-performing teams that delivered business outcomes through technical investment
Nice to have: healthcare, insurance, or another regulated, high-trust domain
A strong product mindset and cross-functional relationships that build trust with users and stakeholders
Comfort with data- and ML-heavy systems: measurement, experimentation, and metric guardrails
Nice to have: value-based care, utilization management, cost-of-care analytics, or marketplace ranking
Nice to have: prior experience with Python, React, and AWS infrastructure
4+ years of experience as a software engineer, enough to hold technical direction credibly
Experience owning an externally-committed metric or launch date, with the scope discipline that requires
Recruitment process
After you apply to Headway, here are some details of what to expect during the interview process
Initial screen: You’ll connect with someone in recruiting so you can learn more about the team, Headway’s mission and exciting growth, and we can get a better idea of your background
First rounds: You’ll meet with an engineering leader on the team to go deeper into your team and people leadership experience. You’ll also complete an AI Coding round — a collaborative session where we’re less focused on syntax and more on how you think through problems and work with AI tools in a technical context
Final rounds: You’ll meet team members across product and engineering leadership for multiple behavioral interviews and one more technical interview (System Design), leaving you with a fuller picture of what it’s like to work at Headway
References and the Offer: Our favorite part of the process! We’ll send over all of the details, including specifics on employee equity, and congratulatory messages from excited future team members!
