Staff Backend Software Engineer (Revenue Engine)

Headway•New York, NY

4d•Remote

About The Position

The Revenue Engine Team is making the foundational platform decisions that will shape how Headway moves money — between patients, providers, and payers — at the scale our growing network demands. As one of two staff engineers in the group, you'll partner with engineering leadership to set technical direction across our Payment Platform and Clearinghouse Platform teams: the systems responsible for our integrations with Stripe, Plaid, and the payer clearinghouses that our claims flow through. This is platform work in the truest sense. Every payment that's charged or paid out, every claim that's filed and reconciled, every dollar that flows through Headway depends on the systems your teams own. As Headway's network grows — more patients, more providers, more payers, more transaction volume — the reliability, throughput, and correctness of these systems become the difference between a business that scales and one that doesn't. Provider trust, patient trust, audit readiness, and revenue capture all hinge on this surface area. You'll lead the design of fault-tolerant, observable, and deeply reconciled integrations with the third-party services we depend on. You'll build the abstractions and standards that let dozens of adjacent engineering teams — Billing Infrastructure, Patient Billing, Provider Payouts, and others — ship faster and more safely on top of our platform. And you'll do it as a hands-on technical leader: writing code where leverage is highest, mentoring senior engineers across both pods, and shaping the operational excellence that this domain demands. This role is for engineers who get energized by distributed systems problems with real consequences — concurrency, idempotency, partial failures, all with a substantial potential blast radius — and who want to apply that craft to a mission that actually matters: building a mental healthcare system that everyone can access.

Requirements

End-to-End Product Builder: Cares about API architecture and user experience, seamlessly context-switching between backend logic and frontend state management.
Owns Outcomes, Not Tasks: Has turned ambiguous problems into shipped software, knows how to define solutions, pull in the right people, and keep things moving.
Sets the Technical Standard: Makes technical decisions optimizing for maintainability and scale, proactively improves engineering velocity.
Mentor by Default: Pulls engineers into design discussions, writes code reviews that teach, ensures knowledge sharing.
Ships Fast, Iterates Faster: Moves quickly from problem statement to working solution, values shipping a good v1 quickly over a perfect v1 later.
Quick Study in Complex Domains: Dives into unfamiliar domains and builds a working mental model fast (prior healthcare experience not required).
Motivated by Impact: Wants engineering skills applied to problems that matter.
Communicates with Precision: Communicates clearly and concisely in various formats (Slack, design docs, meetings).
AI Frontier Tinkerer: Pushes limits of AI tools, experiments with applying LLMs to real workflows, has a builder's mindset for automation and responsible AI use in healthcare.

Nice To Haves

Experience with distributed systems problems (concurrency, idempotency, partial failures).

Responsibilities

Set technical direction across our Payment Platform and Clearinghouse Platform teams.
Lead the design of fault-tolerant, observable, and deeply reconciled integrations with third-party services.
Build abstractions and standards that allow adjacent engineering teams to ship faster and more safely.
Write code where leverage is highest.
Mentor senior engineers across both pods.
Shape the operational excellence that this domain demands.
Apply engineering skills to problems that matter, specifically in building a mental healthcare system that everyone can access.