Staff Backend Software Engineer

Salary: $264,000 - 330,000 per year Requirements:

• We want someone with strong experience in distributed systems and the ability to handle concurrency, idempotency, and partial failure scenarios in high-impact environments.
• We need a senior technical leader who can make architectural choices that prioritize maintainability, scalability, and operational reliability.
• We look for a builder who can own ambiguous problems end to end and turn them into shipped software.
• We value engineers who can mentor others naturally, contribute to design discussions, and elevate team-wide engineering practices.
• We expect clear, concise communication across docs, meetings, and cross-functional collaboration.
• We want someone who can quickly learn complex, unfamiliar domains; prior healthcare experience is not required.
• We are especially interested in people who are motivated by mission-driven work and want to improve mental healthcare access.
• We appreciate hands-on experience with modern engineering stacks such as TypeScript, Python 3, React, Remix, Next.js, FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Postgres, Redis, Snowflake, AWS, Temporal, Kafka, Datadog, Sentry, and PagerDuty.
• We value practical experimentation with AI tools and a builder mindset for using automation responsibly in healthcare.

• We will have you define and lead the technical direction for our Revenue Engine platform, partnering closely with engineering leadership.
• You will help shape the systems that move money between patients, providers, and payers across our network.
• You will design and improve resilient, observable, and well-reconciled integrations with external services such as Stripe, Plaid, and payer clearinghouses.
• You will build abstractions and standards that enable adjacent engineering teams to deliver more quickly and safely.
• You will write code where it creates the greatest leverage and contribute directly as a hands-on technical leader.
• You will mentor senior engineers across multiple teams and help establish a culture of operational excellence.
• You will support the reliability, throughput, and correctness of payment, claims, reconciliation, and payout workflows.
• You will help create platform foundations that scale as our patient, provider, and payer network expands.

• AI
• AWS
• Datadog
• FastAPI
• Support
• Kafka
• Network
• PagerDuty
• Python
• React
• Redis
• Sentry
• Snowflake
• Spark
• TypeScript
• Cloud
• API
• Backend
• Cursor
• Flow
• Frontend
• Slack

More:

We are Headway, and our mission is to build a mental healthcare system everyone can access by removing the insurance and administrative barriers that make therapy too expensive for most people. Our platform is already used by more than 75,000 providers across all 50 states and serves over 1 million patients. We are a Series D company backed by more than $325M from investors including a16z, Accel, and Spark Capital. This Staff Engineering role is based in one of our three hubs: NYC, SF, or Seattle. There is no onsite requirement, though these cities have offices for engineers who want in-person time. We offer a competitive salary of $264,000 to $330,000 base plus equity, comprehensive medical, dental, vision, HSA/FSA, 401(k), fertility reimbursement, 16-week parental leave, reimbursement for therapy, a professional development budget, and generous time off including 13 holidays, a full week off in December, and flexible PTO.

last updated 33 week of 2026