Staff IT Engineer

Headway • Seattle, WA

6d • Remote

About The Position

Headway's mission is to fix the mental healthcare system by building a new system everyone can access, starting by solving the biggest barrier to care: insurance. The administrative work involved in credentialing, claims, and payment reconciliation is a significant challenge, which Headway has automated. With over 75,000 providers across all 50 states using their software to serve over 1 million patients, Headway is building tools for therapists to manage their entire practice, reimagining the process of finding a therapist, and investing in platform foundations for scalability. Headway is becoming the platform where care actually happens and is a Series D company with over $325M in funding from investors like a16z, Accel, and Spark Capital. This role is crucial for establishing the direction of Headway's identity and access program, resolving complex architectural challenges at the intersection of identity, endpoint, security, and the broader IT platform, and elevating the technical standards for engineers. While the focus is on Identity and Access Management (IAM), the role extends beyond it to influence broader engineering and security strategy.

Requirements

• 7+ years in IAM / identity engineering in fast-paced SaaS environments supporting a distributed workforce.
• Deep Okta expertise.
• Sufficient breadth across endpoint, security, and IT platform to lead beyond identity alone.
• Experience defining the technical strategy and architecture for identity programs, not just implementing them.
• Experience with JML automation and SaaS integration via APIs, SCIM, and OIDC/SAML.
• Experience leading organization-wide access-control or RBAC deployments as the technical owner, driving cross-functional alignment and managing user impact at scale.
• Experience establishing patterns, guardrails, and documentation practices that outlast single projects.
• Ability to represent technical decisions to senior stakeholders and leadership, synthesizing complex tradeoffs into clear direction.
• Experience mentoring and growing other engineers, and actively shaping team culture, hiring, and onboarding.
• Experience leading incident response and reliability improvements for identity-critical systems.

Responsibilities

• Set the multi-year direction for identity and access at Headway.
• Own the IAM strategy and roadmap, including lifecycle management, JML automation, and IdP architecture, tied to business outcomes.
• Represent identity in company-wide engineering and security strategy.
• Provide architectural and platform decision-making guidance, particularly concerning the future of identity and access.
• Resolve cross-domain architectural problems involving identity, endpoint, security, and the IT platform, including API/SCIM/OIDC/SAML integration design, RBAC modeling, and device-to-identity trust.
• Set technical patterns and standards for other engineers to follow.
• Lead the organization-wide transition to least-privilege and RBAC as a change program, including defining the model, sequencing rollout, managing user impact, and driving cross-functional adoption.
• Raise the automation and reliability bar for provisioning, de-provisioning, and access-change automation to eliminate manual toil at scale.
• Set standards and guardrails for the team's development efforts, rather than solely authoring individual integrations.
• Own major identity incidents end-to-end, leading response and postmortems, and implementing durable reliability and control improvements.
• Mentor engineers across IT Engineering, set documentation and quality standards, and advise leadership on identity and access risk, tooling, and investment.
• Operate with autonomy and methodical ownership, planning and executing group-level work with visibility.
• Stay current on identity and privacy best practices in a regulated environment (HIPAA / SOC 2 / HITRUST).

Benefits

• Headway is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals.
• Headway will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided with reasonable accommodations.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed