Senior Software Engineer (Trust Foundations)

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 this role: Building for trust is non‑negotiable in our mission of making mental healthcare more accessible and affordable across the US: patients share sensitive information, payers demand demonstrably strong controls, and providers depend on reliable, secure infrastructure. Trust Foundations is responsible for instilling confidence in our products by safeguarding our user’s data. We achieve this by developing out-of-the-box identity, access, and secure-data platforms for other engineering teams to utilize. Our mission is to make the most secure path the most efficient path, enabling clinicians, patients, and payers to trust Headway implicitly. This team is growing and we are hiring for multiple roles at both mid/senior levels . As a Software Engineer/Senior Software Engineer on our Trust Foundations team, you’ll be working on 0-1 access control (RBAC/ABAC), OAuth 2.0/OIDC platforms while shaping the long‑term vision for trust at Headway. You will translate open identity and authorization standards into scalable building blocks; embed privacy‑by‑design and reliability principles into everything we build; and mentor engineers across the company in Trust first thinking. What you’ll do here: Design, build, and operate core trust primitives - authentication providers, authorization engines, data governance, stratified encrypted data stores, and tamper‑evident audits. Embed security privacy by design - Partner with Legal / Compliance to translate regulatory language into concrete engineering controls. Scale our identity rails - Design and evolve multi‑tenant authentication authorization services that handle millions of sessions daily with high availability expectations. Deliver scalable, secure platform foundations - Design and build 0-1 shared services, implement consistent access control patterns that enable product teams to move quickly while ensuring security-by-default (least‑privilege access, encryption in transit and at rest, audit hooks). Turn ambiguous requirements into incremental delivery plans - Lead architecture reviews; break large problems into testable milestones; and make pragmatic build‑vs‑buy decisions in a regulated domain. Champion operational excellence - Instrument services, tune alerting, own on‑call runbooks, and drive post‑incident hardening. Elevate engineering culture - Mentor teammates, document patterns, and help recruit the next generation of Headway engineers. Who you are: Security Mindset: You are passionate about cybersecurity and protecting access to sensitive user data. Cross functional Collaboration - you have demonstrated effective collaboration working with product, infosec and compliance teams. A track record of mentoring engineers , elevating design quality, and improving engineering processes. Secure Architecture: You think of security ... (truncated, view full listing at source)