Staff Data Scientist, SEO, AEO

Headway; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Headway, a Series D company building mental health care access, is seeking a senior data scientist to drive patient growth from search and AI answers. You will own measurement, testing, and analysis across the homepage, directory pages, provider profiles, and earned media.

Reporting to a Data Science manager, you will partner with product, growth marketing, engineering, content, and design to answer key business questions, design experiments, and automate insights that steer content strategy.

Qualifications

• Experience leading measurement and testing in growth projects.
• Strong ability to combine internal data with external sources.
• Experience with SEO and AI-driven content strategies.

Responsibilities

• Lead measurement and testing strategy and execution.
• Design matched market and A/B tests.
• Analyze traffic and patient changes to explain outcomes.
• Raise the bar for organic growth metrics.

Skills

Data science

A/B testing

Analytics

Tools

Google Search Console

Ahrefs

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 90,000 providers across all 50 states run their practice on our software, serving over 2.6 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, and building much of it with AI. 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

More and more people start their search for a therapist on Google or in an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity. We want Headway to be the most trusted place to research and find mental health care in both. You will be the data scientist who tells us what is working, why, and what to do next.

This is a senior individual contributor role supporting Patient Growth. You will report to a Data Science manager and work hand in hand with cross-functional partners including product, growth marketing, engineering, content, and design. Your core focus is driving new patients from search (SEO) and AI answers (AEO) and the surfaces that drive them: our homepage, directory pages, provider profiles, and earned media (PR, Affiliates, Reddit, YouTube, etc.).

Example questions you will own:

• Which bets are worth making, and how will we know if they worked?
• What should we stop doing because it is not paying off?
• How do we show up and get cited in AI answers?
• When traffic or patients changed, what moved them?

What you will do

Lead our measurement and testing strategy and execution. Combine our own data (e.g. Google Search Console, clickstream data, bookings) with outside sources (e.g. Ahrefs, agency partners) for a single source of truth. Design matched market and A/B tests. Answer key business and product questions. Which bets are worth making, and how will we know if they worked? What should we stop doing because it is not paying off? How do we show up and get cited in AI answers? When traffic or patients change, what drove the change? Automate the analysis loop. Build AI agents and workflows to tell us what's working, what changed, what we should do next. Feed the results back into how we pick and write content. Raise the bar. Set standards for how organic growth gets measured across the team, and help partner