Principal, Clinical Strategy and Execution

Headway; United States; Hybrid; USD 144,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity Compensation

Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage

HSA / FSA

401K

Work-from-Home Stipend

Therapy Reimbursement

16-week parental leave

Carrot Fertility annual reimbursement

13 paid holidays

Flexible PTO

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Training and professional development

Job summary

Headway is seeking a Principal, Clinical Strategy and Execution to own how the clinical organization runs, including governance, policy lifecycle, and risk management.

You will drive the operating rhythm, program management for clinical initiatives, and cross-functional collaboration with Compliance, Operations, Legal, and Product. This is a senior IC role with broad scope across governance and program execution.

Qualifications

• Active clinical license with 7+ years in mental health settings.
• Experience building governance structures, policies or risk programs in a clinical/healthcare setting.
• Ability to lead without formal authority and influence across cross-functional teams.
• Strong data orientation with ability to set baselines, targets, and measure outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Run clinical governance committee operations: charters, membership, cadence, agendas, minutes, action items.
• Own the clinical team’s operating rhythm: staff meetings, planning, cross-functional forums, communications.
• Drive the OKR cycle end to end for the clinical organization with alignment to company OKRs.
• Own the clinical policy lifecycle end to end from intake to distribution and attestation.
• Oversee execution of clinical programs: plans, milestones, status, and cross-functional coordination.
• Systematize the clinical team’s risk register as a live instrument within Headway's enterprise risk management.

Skills

Clinical governance

Policy work

Program management

Cross-functional collaboration

Data-driven decision making

Operational excellence

Ambiguity tolerance

Education

Clinical licensure (LCSW/LPC/LMFT/PhD/PsyD/PMHNP-BC/MD/DO)

Job description

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.

About the Role

Headway is looking for a Principal, Clinical Strategy and Execution to own how our clinical organization runs. Our clinical functions — clinical product, clinical quality, patient safety, clinical education, and more — carry a set of standing obligations that grows every quarter: governance committees, the OKR cycle, the clinical policy lifecycle, the clinical risk register, and an expanding portfolio of clinical programs. Today that work is distributed across clinical leaders and subject-matter experts who are also accountable for clinical outcomes. This role creates a single owner for how that governance work is run — while the teams that investigate, audit, and act on provider and patient risk continue to own that work.

You’ll be a senior individual contributor who leads through ownership and influence, building governance infrastructure that scales as our network, service lines, and regulatory surface area grow. You will own the operating system that lets the clinical team make fast and clear strategic decisions that keep us aligned with our cross functional partners and the organization. As Headway opens novel referral channels, each one needs clinical protocols, triage and acuity criteria, escalation pathways, and documented standards before it can scale. You’ll carry the day-to-day program management — milestones, dependencies, resourcing, escalation, and reporting — while clinical leadership retains clinical decision rights and accountability for clinical content and outcomes. You’ll partner with a Senior Clinical Strategy Associate on committee and cadence operations, and work across Compliance, Operations, Data, Product, and more.

If you’re a clinician who has built and led clinical programs at scale in a tech-enabled environment, this is a rare chance to design how clinical care is governed as it grows.

You Will

• Run clinical governance committee operations: charters, membership, meeting cadence, agendas, pre-reads, minutes, decision logs, and action items driven to closure, in partnership with Clinical Operations and other cross-functional teams

• Own the clinical team’s operating rhythm: staff meetings, planning sessions, offsites, cross-functional forums, and internal communication

• Drive the OKR cycle end to end for the clinical organization: drafting support and calibration, alignment to department and company OKRs, baseline and target setting with data partners, coordination for cross-functional resourcing, mid-cycle check-ins, scoring, and retrospectives; maintain the source of truth and surface off-track objectives early with a recommended path

• Own the clinical policy lifecycle end to end: intake, drafting and revision alongside clinical subject-matter experts, review and approval routing, version control, effective dates, scheduled re-review, cross-functional enablement, and the downstream distribution, attestation, and training handoffs, including external-facing policy and regulatory work as directed by clinical leadership

• Oversee execution of our clinical programs under the direction of clinical leadership: program plans, milestones, dependencies, and owners; status reporting and escalation; cross-functional coordination; program metrics and outcomes

• Systematize the clinical team’s risk register entries as a live instrument within the Headway enterprise risk register: intake and triage of newly identified risks, consistent scoring and documentation, coordinating clinical team involvement in compliance-led audits, assignment of risk owners and mitigations, and reporting to clinical leadership

• Act as the primary administrative interface between the clinical team and the departments we work across, including Compliance, Operations, Legal, Product, Growth, and more

You’d Be a Great Fit If You Have

• An active clinical license as a master’s level therapist (LCSW, LPC, LMFT), doctorate level clinical psychologist (PhD/PsyD), or other psychiatric clinician (PMHNP-BC, MD/DO), with 7+ years of experience in mental health settings

• Comfort with ambiguity and a builder’s instinct. You build durable systems from scratch, manage complexity without dropping details, and anticipate and solve problems before they come to clinical leadership’s attention

• Experience with clinical governance and policy work. For example, supporting committees, moving policies or protocols through review and approval, or contributing to risk, accreditation, or audit processes in a clinical or healthcare setting

• Genuine operational excellence and a track record of holding programs to a standard and timeline without formal authority. You’ve managed concurrent initiatives, and you hold senior clinicians and cross-functional partners to their commitments without jeopardizing the working relationship

• A data-informed approach. You set baselines and targets, partner with data teams, and report progress in numbers

• Real collaboration skill without formal authority. You inform senior clinicians and cross-functional partners, and you hold people accountable to timelines and commitments without jeopardizing the working relationship

• Motivation from the problem. You want to work on one of our generation’s defining challenges: access to affordable, high-quality mental healthcare

Compensation and Benefits:

The expected base pay range for this position is $144,000 - $280,000, based on a variety of factors including qualifications, experience, and geographic location.

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

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. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please inform the recruiter when they contact you to schedule your interview.

Headway participates in E-Verify.

A notice to Headway applicants: To protect yourself against phishing and recruitment fraud, please note that Headway only accepts applications through our official careers page at https://headway.co/careers. Headway will never refer you to external websites, ask for payment or personal information, or conduct interviews via messaging apps. All official communication will come from a @findheadway.com email address. If you are contacted by someone claiming to be from Headway via an unofficial channel, please do not share any information and report it as spam.