Director of Data Science - Patient

Director of Data Science - Patient

New York, New York, United States; San Francisco, California, United States; Seattle, Washington, United States

1 in 4 people in the US have a treatable mental health condition, but most providers don't accept insurance, making therapy too expensive for most people. Headway's mission is to fix this by building a new mental healthcare system everyone can access. We started by solving the biggest barrier to care: insurance. The admin work - credentialing, claims, payment reconciliation - is a nightmare. We've automated that.

But we're going further. Over 75,000 providers across all 50 states run their practice on our software, serving over 1 million patients. We are building the best tools for therapists to run their entire practice, reimagining the experience of finding a therapist, and investing in the platform foundations to enable this at scale. We aren't just a billing layer; we are becoming the platform where care actually happens.

We're a Series D company with $325M+ in funding (a16z, Accel, Spark Capital, etc.), looking for exceptional people to help us achieve this mission. We want your time here to be the most meaningful experience of your career. Join us, and help change mental healthcare for the better.

Patients are at the center of Headway's mission and analytics plays a critical role in how we serve them. As the Director of Data Science, Patient you will lead the data science organization that helps Headway build an extraordinarily successful consumer brand and patient marketplace, with a relentless focus on measurable growth and patient impact. You will be the data science peer to senior leaders across Product, Growth Marketing, Operations, Finance, and Clinical, and you will set the standards and direction for how we evaluate acquisition, conversion, retention, and outcomes. This is a senior leadership role for a driver who can turn ambiguity into clarity, build a high-performing team, and create the insight engine that makes a consumer healthcare business win.

In this role, you will:

Shape a world-class patient product experience

• Partner with product, engineering, and operations to deeply understand the patient journey and identify the highest-leverage opportunities to improve discovery, conversion, and cures.
• Lead the analytics approach for product changes: clarify goals, define success metrics and guardrails, diagnose trade-offs, and ensure learnings drive roadmap decisions.
• Build strong segmentation and cohort understanding to explain who we serve best, where drop-offs happen, and what experiences drive long-term value.

Build the patient growth and marketing analytics engine

• Own the analytics strategy for consumer acquisition and performance marketing, ensuring we can evaluate channel effectiveness, creative performance, conversion quality, CAC efficiency, and incrementality.
• Partner with Growth Marketing and Finance to improve budget allocation decisions through clear measurement, forecasting inputs, and crisp performance narratives.
• Establish an operating cadence that makes marketing performance, funnel health, and unit economics legible to leaders, and turns weekly learning into action.

Run a high-velocity learning system

• Establish a rigorous experimentation culture across marketing and product, including clear hypotheses, fast iteration loops, strong guardrails, and decision-oriented readouts.
• Create repeatable "insight to action" mechanisms: standardized deep dives, performance narratives, and decision memos that accelerate leadership alignment.

Scale an elite team

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of data scientists and data science managers; set clear expectations for ownership, communication, and impact.
• Recruit and retain world-class talent and build an org structure that scales from 6 - 8 people to roughly double that size through 2026.
• Build strong managers and tech leads, and create a culture that is rigorous, curious, and relentlessly focused on business outcomes.

Own standards for truth and clarity

• Define and enforce metric standards across the patient funnel so teams align on what matters and can confidently compare performance over time.
• Ensure stakeholders have trustworthy self-serve reporting and clear definitions, minimizing time spent debating numbers.

Marketing analytics priorities (core to the role)

• Performance marketing measurement: channel performance, creative learning, funnel conversion, landing experiences, and attribution.
• Incrementally and causal measurement: designing tests and analyses that distinguish correlation from true impact.
• Budget and efficiency narratives: CAC, payback, cohort quality, saturation effects, and marginal ROI.
• Growth diagnostics: identifying why performance changed, what levers matter, and what actions will improve results.

You'll be a great fit if:

• You have 10+ years of experience in data science/analytics, growth analytics, marketing analytics, product analytics, or data-driven strategy, including 6+ years leading and scaling teams.
• You have built analytics that materially improved consumer growth outcomes: acquisition efficiency, conversion, retention, and product-led expansion.
• You have strong marketing analytics instincts and can partner credibly with Growth leaders on channels, creative, attribution, and incrementality.
• You can translate messy consumer journeys into clear metrics, crisp narratives, and high-quality decisions, without slowing teams down.
• You are an exceptional leader and coach with a track record of hiring world-class talent and building high-performance teams.
• You bring intellectual honesty and strong judgment, and you can push back when measurement is weak or narratives are wrong.
• You have deep expertise in experimentation design, statistical inference, and causal methods such as CUPED, diff-in-diff, synthetic controls, or propensity modeling
• Experience partnering cross functionally to drive measurable improvements in user experience or product performance
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward action, clarity, and iteration
• You are motivated to advance Headway's mission to make mental healthcare more accessible and affordable across the United States

Compensation & Benefits:

The expected base pay range for this position is $249,600 - $312,000, based on a variety of factors including qualifications, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for an equity grant, depending on the position and level.

We are committed to offering a comprehensive and competitive total rewards package, including robust health and wellness benefits, retirement savings, and meaningful ownership opportunities through equity. Compensation decisions are made holistically, ensuring fairness and alignment with market benchmarks while recognizing individual contributions and potential.

• Benefits offered include:
• Equity compensation
• Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage
• HSA / FSA
• 401K
• Work-from-Home Stipend
• Therapy Reimbursement
• 16-week parental leave for eligible employees
• Carrot Fertility annual reimbursement and membership
• 13 paid holidays each year as well as a Holiday Break during the week between December 25th and December 31st
• Flexible PTO
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Training and professional development