Senior Backend Software Engineer

Headway’s mission is a big one – to build a new mental health care system everyone can access. We’ve built technology that helps people find great therapists with the first software-enabled national network of providers accepting insurance. 

1 in 4 people in the US have a treatable mental health condition, but the majority of providers don’t accept insurance, making therapy too expensive for most people. Headway is building a new mental healthcare system that everyone can access by making it easy for therapists to accept insurance and scale their practice. 

Headway was founded in 2019. Since then, we’ve grown into a diverse, national network of over 60,000 mental healthcare providers across all 50 states who run their practice on our software and have served over 1 million patients. We’re a Series D company with over $325m in funding from a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), Accel, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Spark Capital, Thrive Capital, Forerunner Ventures and Health Care Service Corporation.

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 affecting 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 iteration
• 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, and more), Spark and Kafka
• Monitoring: Datadog, PagerDuty, Sentry
• Version Control: Github, PagerDuty
• Vulnerability Management: Snyk, Semgrep
• Cloud Security: Lacework

Projects we’re working on:

There is a lot that we're building at Headway, but here are a few projects to give you an idea of the problems we're tackling.

• Financial Processing and Bookkeeping: One way to think about Headway is that we help thousands of independent providers operate a small practice. Having detailed and accurate financial systems is critical to their success. Their livelihood depends on us and as their trusted partner, we take that seriously.
• Claims Management and Insurance Processing: We make a guarantee to patients when they seek care that they will have a predictable cost with us. We make a guarantee with providers that they will have easy insurance operations. Meanwhile, Headway processes hundreds of thousands of claims monthly across all states, all major insurance networks and governmental programs. Our systems must be up to the task.
• Internal Tooling Platform: In healthcare there is always a human component. Engineers build internal tools for multiple non-technical teams and need a scalable, quality platform to deliver them. This platform supports tools for our CX team who is interfacing directly with patients and providers, our ops team who is dealing with claims denials and escalations, and our medical team who is dealing with care quality.
• Therapist practice management: Building a best-in-class platform for Headway therapists to manage their patients, appointments, payments, and more.
• Patient search and matching: Transforming the therapist search experience and becoming the trusted guide for patients to find the right therapist.

Who you are

We’re looking for experienced engineers who have the ability to deal with ambiguity and learn new technologies and systems.  Below are some additional experiences we think help engineers succeed at Headway.

For all engineers:

• You