Headway's mission is to build a new mental health care system everyone can access. The majority of mental health providers do not accept insurance, making therapy unaffordable for most people. Headway is building a new mental healthcare system that everyone can access by making it easy for therapists to accept insurance and scale their practice.
Requirements
- 5 + years of professional software engineering with a strong command of at least one modern language (we use Python 3 and TypeScript).
- Proven systems‑architecture leadership - you have shaped requirements, led cross‑team roadmaps, and delivered complex backend or platform services at scale.
- Deep expertise in one of two focus areas: Identity and Access - demonstrated experience working with third party IdPs, expertise with OAuth 2.0 / OIDC standards, have implemented step‑up MFA and common RBAC frameworks.
- Deep expertise in one of two focus areas: Platform Engineering (scalable, secure foundations) - demonstrated experience building high‑throughput, fault‑tolerant services that bake in security‑by‑default patterns, provide clear developer interfaces, and enable downstream teams to move faster.
- A track record of mentoring engineers, elevating design quality, and improving engineering processes.
- Sound build‑vs‑buy judgment and the ability to collaborate with product, legal, and operations in a highly regulated environment.
- Translate open standards - OAuth 2.0 / OIDC, RBAC/ABAC, envelope encryption - into scalable building blocks; embed privacy‑by‑design and reliability principles into everything we build; and mentor engineers across the company in Trust first thinking.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate core trust primitives - authentication providers, authorization engines, stratified encrypted data stores, and tamper‑evident telemetry.
- Embed security & privacy by design - Codify guardrails in linting rules and CI, and partner with Legal / Compliance to translate regulatory language into concrete engineering controls.
- Scale our identity rails - Design and evolve multi-tenant authentication & authorization services that handle millions of sessions daily with high availability expectations.
- Deliver scalable, secure platform foundations - Build shared services that embed security‑by‑default (least‑privilege access, encryption in transit and at rest, audit hooks) and expose intuitive APIs so product teams can move quickly without compromising trust.
- Turn ambiguous requirements into incremental delivery plans - Lead architecture reviews; break large problems into testable milestones; and make pragmatic build‑vs‑buy decisions in a regulated domain.
- Champion operational excellence - Instrument services, tune alerting, own on‑call runbooks, and drive post‑incident hardening.
- Elevate engineering culture - Mentor teammates, document patterns, and help recruit the next generation of Headway engineers.
Other
- Join us, and help change mental healthcare for the better.
- We want your time here to be the most meaningful experience of your career.
- Building for trust is non‑negotiable in our mission of making mental healthcare more accessible and affordable across the US: patients share sensitive information, payers demand demonstrably strong controls, and providers depend on reliable, secure infrastructure.
- We believe a team's strength is in its people, and we cannot achieve this mission without a team that reflects the diversity of this problem – across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, national origin, religion, family status, disability, military status, and experience.
- Headway is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Headway will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided with reasonable accommodations.
