Staff Software Engineer (Payer)

Headway • New York, NY

14d • Remote

About The Position

Headway's mission is to make mental healthcare accessible by building a new system where most providers accept insurance. We have automated the administrative work like credentialing, claims, and payment reconciliation. Over 75,000 providers use our software, serving over 1 million patients. We are developing tools for therapists to manage their practices, improving the process of finding a therapist, and building scalable platform foundations. We are more than just a billing service; we are creating the platform where care is delivered. As a Series D company with over $325M in funding, we are seeking exceptional individuals to help us achieve our mission and make this the most meaningful experience of your career. The Payers & Outcomes team at Headway operates at the intersection of Machine Learning, clinical quality, and trust. This role involves building intelligent systems to maintain network integrity, identify risks, highlight quality indicators, and provide real-time feedback to providers to ensure high-quality care.

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 experience with ambiguous problems, defining solutions, collaborating across teams, and managing shifting priorities.
• Sets the Technical Standard: Makes technical decisions optimizing for maintainability and scale, proactively improves engineering velocity.
• Mentor by Default: Pulls engineers into design discussions, provides teaching code reviews, ensures knowledge sharing.
• Ships Fast, Iterates Faster: Moves quickly from problem statement to working solution, values shipping v1 quickly over perfect v1 later.
• Quick Study in Complex Domains: Dives into unfamiliar domains like healthcare, regulations, and exceptions to build a working mental model fast.
• Motivated by Impact: Wants engineering skills applied to problems that matter, like fixing mental healthcare access.
• Communicates with Precision: Communicates clearly and concisely in all forms of communication.
• AI Frontier Tinkerer: Has experimented with applying LLMs to real workflows, possesses a builder's mindset for automation and responsible AI deployment in healthcare.

Nice To Haves

• Prior healthcare experience is not required, but the ability to quickly understand complex domains is essential.

Responsibilities

• Architect LLM-powered systems to review clinical documentation at scale and provide real-time feedback to providers, transforming audits into coaching experiences.
• Design ML/LLM systems to detect patterns of inappropriate billing, over-utilization, and low-quality care across millions of appointments and claims, translating these signals into actionable feedback and transparent reporting.
• Build systems to systematically evaluate every prescriber against clinical quality standards for measurement, improvement, and defense of care quality.
• Develop ML systems to understand patient needs and match them with the most suitable providers, ensuring optimal care and provider utilization.
• Champion the evaluation and iteration of AI systems, building frameworks, optimization loops, and observability for reliable and safe LLM-powered features in a regulated environment.
• Set the technical direction for the Payers & Outcomes group, laying architectural foundations for future growth and enhancing the team's engineering craft.
• Own end-to-end product development, from API architecture to user experience, seamlessly switching between backend and frontend responsibilities.
• Take ownership of outcomes, transforming ambiguous problems into shipped software and driving solutions by collaborating with cross-functional teams.
• Make technical decisions that prioritize maintainability and scalability, proactively improving engineering velocity through tooling, automation, and bug-prevention patterns.
• Mentor engineers by including them in design discussions, providing educational code reviews, and ensuring knowledge sharing across the team.
• Ship and iterate quickly, prioritizing a good v1 this week over a perfect v1 next month, valuing real feedback over extensive design reviews.
• Dive into complex domains like healthcare, regulations, and exceptions to quickly build a working mental model.
• Apply engineering skills to impactful problems, contributing to the mission of improving mental healthcare access.
• Communicate clearly and concisely in all forms of communication, bringing others along with technical vision.
• Experiment with and push the limits of AI tools, applying LLMs to real workflows responsibly in healthcare.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, HSA/FSA, 401(k), Carrot Fertility reimbursement, and 16-week parental leave.
• Reimbursement for therapy.
• Professional development budget.
• 13 holidays, a full week off in December, and flexible PTO.

What This Job Offers

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