Director, Engineering - Patient

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 70,000 providers across all 50 states run their practice on our software, serving over 1 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. 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, GV, 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 Headway Headway's mission is to build a new mental health care system that everyone can access. We've built technology that takes the hardest parts of mental healthcare — finding the right provider, navigating insurance, managing payments — and makes them simple. We're now one of the fastest-growing companies in healthcare, with more than 200,000 patients finding care through Headway and thousands of therapists using our platform to grow their practices. About Patient Core Experience at Headway The Patient Core Experience team owns how patients find the right therapist on Headway. From search through the first several sessions, our four engineering pods — Onboarding, Profiles + Checkout, Ranking + Relevance, and Activation — build the systems that make great therapeutic matches happen. We operate a three-sided marketplace (patients, providers, payers) with real complexity and massive impact. We're evolving from a provider directory into an intelligent matching platform that uses communication style, data-backed expertise signals, and patient-reported outcomes to connect people with therapists who are genuinely right for them. Principles that guide us: Matching quality is the foundation of therapeutic outcomes — we obsess over getting patients to the right provider We ship fast and learn fast, but we protect patient trust above all else We build for the whole marketplace: patients, providers, and payers ML powers our systems, but empathy drives our product The Problems You'll Solve This role exists because we have hard, specific challenges that need senior engineering leadership to crack. Here's what your first year looks like: Build an ML-powered matching system from the ground up. Our current matching is largely filter-based. We need to move to ML-powered ranking that incorporates provider communication style, expertise signals, and patient outcome data — without degrading the patient experience during the transition. You'll define the technical strategy for how we get there and own the execution across multiple pods. Rearchitect team topology as the product evolves. We have four pods today, but the boundaries between ranking, activation, and onboarding will shift as we move toward intelligent matching. You'll need to evolve team structure, ownership boundaries, and technical interfaces as the product changes shape. This includes scaling the org from ~18 to ~25+ engineers while maintaining velocity and quality. Close the gap between engineering output and patient outcomes. We have patient funnel metrics (intake-to-match, match-to-book, book-to-retained) but engineering doesn't yet co-own them tightly enough with Product and Data. You'll establish the operating model where engineering, product, and data science jointly own these metrics in a true triad — not one where engineering is an execution arm. Define how y ... (truncated, view full listing at source)