Staff / Principal Product Manager, Ranking

Headway

6d • $265,000 - $375,000

About The Position

One million patients a month ask for a referral to a mental health provider. When they search on Headway, the order of results decides who books and who gives up. You own that order. The scope is patient–provider matching: the retrieval and ranking systems, the strategy for where they go next, how we think about our data strategy and platform to . Your mission: maximize successful matches. Not clicks. Not bookings. Patients who connect with a provider, stay in care, and get better. It's the most technical PM seat in the Patient org. The ranking stack is ML-powered, and the roadmap runs deep: learned relevance models, semantic and free-text search, matching built on better evidence of each provider's expertise. You'll set that roadmap and get the executive team behind it, working with a dedicated pod of search and ML engineers and embedded data scientists. This is not a role for someone who needs a well-defined problem. The best candidates have a track record of finding the right problem and convincing the organization to solve it.

Requirements

• 10+ years of product management experience, including hands-on ownership of search, ranking, recommendations, or marketplace matching at scale.
• Shipped ML ranking or relevance systems to real users. You can discuss objective function design, feature development, and offline vs. online evaluation from experience.
• Can hold an architecture conversation with ML engineers, challenge modeling assumptions, and make informed build-vs-buy calls.
• Lived marketplace trade-offs and understand that ranking allocates opportunity across one.
• Fluent in embeddings, semantic search, and LLM-powered product, and you know which of them actually ships value.
• Presented strategy to executives and held your ground on the hard questions.
• Motivated by Headway's mission of making mental healthcare accessible and affordable.

Responsibilities

• Set the strategy for search, retrieval, and ranking, and get engineering, data science, design, clinical, and the executive team behind it.
• Run the experimentation program end to end: hypotheses, objective functions, guardrail metrics, honest readouts. Report the losses too.
• Build the data, evaluation, and ML platform foundations that unlock the next two to three years of matching work.
• Work daily with ML engineers and data scientists on model objectives, features, and evaluation. You won't write the models. You will be a real thought partner on what they optimize.
• Carry ranking's priorities across the company. Ranking touches patient experience, provider growth, clinical quality, and payer partnerships; resolving those competing priorities is the job, not a distraction from it.
• Set the bar for technically grounded product work across the PM team.

What This Job Offers

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