Staff Data Scientist, SEO & AEO

Headway•New York, NY

3d•$212,000 - $265,000

About The Position

Headway is hiring a Staff Data Scientist to support Patient Growth and help the company become a trusted destination for researching and finding mental health care through traditional search and AI assistants. This senior individual contributor will analyze and improve organic patient acquisition across SEO, AI answers (AEO), and related surfaces, including the homepage, directory pages, provider profiles, and earned media. The role reports to a Data Science manager and partners with product, growth marketing, engineering, content, design, and external agencies. The position combines measurement strategy, experimentation, causal analysis, business and product insights, and AI-enabled automation. The data scientist will connect internal data such as Google Search Console, clickstream, and bookings with external sources such as Ahrefs and agency data; design matched-market and A/B tests; assess what drives changes in traffic and patient growth; and guide decisions about which initiatives to pursue or stop. They will also build AI agents and workflows to automate analysis and feed findings into content decisions, while establishing measurement standards and helping partners distinguish meaningful signals from noise.

Requirements

10+ years of experience using data science and analytics to drive decisions, with a strong growth background.
Experience working in a fast-changing environment without an established playbook.
Growth mindset, bias toward execution, ability to set priorities, and ability to move quickly.
First-principles thinking and understanding of the limits and biases of different data sources.
Strong causal-inference judgment in messy settings.
Product mindset, including consideration of business trade-offs and contribution of new ideas.
Knowledge of causal inference and quasi-experiments, with the ability to balance rigor against speed and cost and make decisions without a perfect test.
Strong SQL and Python skills.
Comfort pulling data from APIs, modeling in dbt, and building workflows.
Clear communication skills, including explaining complex measurement issues and data limitations to non-technical partners and executives.
Experience building AI agents or automated analysis workflows.
Daily use of a tool such as Claude Code or Codex and ability to assess the quality of AI output.

Nice To Haves

Experience with SEO or AEO at a company where organic was a major channel.
Experience with marketplaces or two-sided growth, balancing and matching supply and demand.
Experience measuring acquisition quality beyond the first conversion, including retention, engagement, and lifetime value.
Experience owning or rebuilding a marketing attribution model.
Experience with search console data and SEO/AEO visibility tools.
Experience with earned media, affiliate, or community channels and their effects on search and AI visibility.

Responsibilities

Lead the strategy and execution of measurement and testing for organic growth.
Combine internal sources such as Google Search Console, clickstream, and bookings with external sources such as Ahrefs and agency partners to create a single source of truth.
Design matched-market and A/B tests.
Answer business and product questions about which initiatives to pursue or stop, how to gain visibility and citations in AI answers, and what causes changes in traffic or patient growth.
Build AI agents and workflows to automate analysis, identify what is working and changing, and recommend next steps.
Feed analysis results back into content selection and writing.
Set standards for measuring organic growth across the team.
Help partners and agencies distinguish meaningful signals from noise.