Senior Backend Software Engineer

Headway’s mission is to fix this by building a new mental healthcare system everyone can access. 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. We started by solving the biggest barrier to care: insurance. The admin work—credentialing, claims, payment reconciliation—is a nightmare. We’ve automated that. We’re a Series D company with $325M+ in funding, and we are building the best tools for therapists to run their entire practice, reimagining the experience of finding a therapist, and investing in platform foundations to enable this at scale.

The Work

Backend At Headway Involves High‑stakes Logic. You’re Building a Reliable Abstraction Layer Over a Fragmented Healthcare System.

• Modern AI‑enabled Clinical System: design and build systems that store and manage clinical data, including treatment plans, progress notes, patient history, and AI‑powered clinical intelligence—e.g., session‑to‑note generation and automated summaries.
• Insurance Billing Engine: scale systems that handle the unique rules of every major insurance payer to accurately estimate and file claims hundreds of thousands of times per month.
• Patient‑First Infrastructure: build backend services that power personalized care recommendations, health tracking, and longitudinal data views as well as innovative user experiences to help patients find a therapist that meets their needs.
• Financial Integrity: work on ledger systems that ensure 70,000+ providers get paid accurately, requiring idempotency and strict consistency in a multi‑party marketplace.

Our Stack

• Languages: Python, TypeScript
• Storage: Postgres, Redis, Snowflake
• Infrastructure: AWS, Temporal
• Ops: Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty
• AI Tools: Cursor, Claude, Gemini, Eddy (in‑house cloud agent harness)

Who You Are

• Owns Outcomes, Not Tasks: turn ambiguous problems into shipped software and drive from definition to delivery.
• Sets the Technical Standard: make decisions that optimize for maintainability and scale, improving engineering velocity through tooling, automation, and patterns.
• Mentor by Default: engage teammates in design discussions, teach through code reviews, and share knowledge widely.
• Ships Fast, Iterates Faster: deliver a working v1 quickly and refine based on real feedback.
• Quick Study in Complex Domains: learn unfamiliar domains—healthcare, payers, regulations—fast and build a working mental model.
• Motivated by Impact: apply engineering skills to problems that matter and help fix mental healthcare access.
• Communicates with Precision: clearly express ideas in Slack, design docs, and meetings.
• AI Frontier Tinkerer: experiment with LLMs in real workflows, push their limits responsibly in healthcare contexts.

Compensation & Benefits

• Salary: $182,750 – $278,500 base salary plus a competitive equity package.
• Comprehensive Benefits: medical, dental, vision, HSA/FSA, 401(k), Carrot Fertility reimbursement, and 16‑week parental leave.
• Mission‑Aligned: reimburse your therapy and provide a professional development budget.
• Time Off: 13 holidays, a full week off in December, and flexible PTO.

We believe a team’s strength is in its people, and we cannot achieve this mission without a team that reflects the diversity of this problem—across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, national origin, religion, family status, disability, military status, and experience. Headway is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Headway will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided with reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please inform the recruiter.

Headway participates in E‑Verify. All official communication will come from a @findheadway.com email address. If you are contacted by someone claiming to be from Headway via an unofficial channel, please do not share any information and report it as spam.