Staff Infrastructure Engineer

Headway; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 265,000 - 331,000; Full time

Job summary

Headway is building a modern cloud infrastructure to support a rapidly growing mental health platform. We seek a Staff-level Infrastructure Engineer to own the cloud platform powering all engineering deployments, and to make deployments boring, scalable, and self-serve.

You will own the ECS/EKS footprint, autoscaling, cost attribution, and Python runtime health on AWS, collaborating across teams to raise the bar for reliability and speed of delivery.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in platform, infrastructure, or SRE roles with production traffic
• Deep AWS expertise including compute, networking at scale (ECS, EKS, RDS)
• Strong IaC experience, Terraform, self-serve platforms for other teams
• Hands-on autoscaling and capacity engineering with container orchestration
• Track record of deploying safely and enabling self-serve for other teams
• Staff-level influence across teams and driving infra improvements org-wide

Responsibilities

• Own deployment architecture and blast-radius containment to prevent outages
• Own ECS/EKS footprint and inter-service connectivity
• Drive capacity planning with data-driven autoscaling
• Build Terraform self-serve platform with guardrails for standard infra changes
• Establish per-team cost attribution across AWS, Datadog, and LLM spend
• Lead Python runtime and dependency health for the monolith, including upgrades

Skills

Platform engineering

AWS expertise

SRE/DevOps

Infrastructure as code

Autoscaling

Cross-team influence

Tools

Terraform

ECS

EKS

RDS

Datadog

IAM

Kubernetes

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.

The Role

Architect and own the cloud platform that every engineer at Headway deploys on. Make deploys boring, scaling automatic, infrastructure self-serve, and cost attributable.

About Infrastructure Engineering At Headway

Building a new mental healthcare system at Headway is only possible because of the scale and leverage that software can provide. Infrastructure Engineering is one of three teams in Engineering Foundations, alongside Agentic Engineering and Eddy, Headway's internal AI platform. We own the infrastructure Headway runs on, as well as the performance and scalability of Headway's FastAPI/Python monolith, and the AWS infrastructure it runs on. We are the paved road the rest of engineering builds on: databases, deploys, asynchronous platform, observability, autoscaling, and self-serve compute infrastructure.

As AI dramatically increases code velocity across the org, our mandate is to make every change safe from the start and build systems that get safer as they get faster.

About This Role

You will own the cloud platform Headway runs on. You will lead the work to isolate blast radius, make autoscaling trustworthy, and build a self-serve infrastructure platform so that the Infrastructure Engineering team focuses on the strategic and unusual, not the routine.

You will serve as the technical anchor for Headway's compute, networking, and deployment platform, and bring Staff-level influence to an area that every engineer depends on daily.

What You'll Own

• Deployment architecture and blast-radius containment. Redesign deployment so that a mistake in one part of our service cannot block or take down others. Continue to drive our shift toward per-service deploy isolation and functional-area slices that contain failures rather than propagating them across the platform.
• Container footprint and networking. Own the ECS and EKS footprint, evaluate broader EKS adoption for AI workloads, and design the next iteration of inter-service network connectivity.
• Capacity and scaling. Own capacity for a spiky workload: floors computed ahead of demand rather than chased by reactive scaling, self-deriving from data, with drift caught early.
• Self-serve infrastructure platform. Build the Terraform self-serve platform with guardrails so engineering teams own their standard infrastructure changes and Reliability Engineering reviews only the non-standard ones.
• Cloud cost attribution and controls. Stand up per-team cost attribution across AWS, Datadog, and LLM spend. Make infrastructure costs visible and attributable so teams can make informed tradeoffs.
• Python runtime and dependency health. Own how the monolith behaves under load: garbage collection, event loop contention, and the runtime limits that bite first. Lead the framework and package upgrades most teams defer.

Who You Are

A technical leader who combines deep cloud and infrastructure expertise with the instincts to drive alignment across teams. You thrive in ambiguity, operate with a high degree of ownership, and are as comfortable setting technical direction as you are building. You make other engineers better through architecture reviews, runbooks, and paved-road tooling that raises the baseline for everyone who ships on the platform.

Experience We're Seeking

• 8 or more years in platform, infrastructure, or SRE roles at companies running significant production traffic
• Deep AWS expertise and production ownership of compute and networking at scale (ECS, EKS, RDS, networking, IAM)
• Strong infrastructure-as-code experience, particularly Terraform, including designing self-serve platforms for other engineering teams
• Hands-on autoscaling and capacity engineering, and container orchestration with ECS and/or EKS
• Track record making deploys safe and self-serve for other teams, not just your own
• Staff-level influence: you drive decisions across team boundaries and raise the infrastructure bar org-wide without requiring management authority to do it

Nice To Have

• FinOps and cloud cost optimization experience
• Kubernetes and EKS depth
• Observability tooling at scale (Datadog)
• Experience in healthcare or other regulated environments
• Experience with event driven systems

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.

Compensation Range: $265K - $331K