Staff Software Engineer - Insurance

Headway; United States; Remote; USD 224,000 - 336,000; Full time

Job summary

Headway is building a platform to make mental healthcare accessible and affordable across the United States. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer (Insurance) to lead the design and implementation of systems that power our insurance operations, including patient identification, pricing estimates, provider matching, and claims processing.

You will work across all 50 states, 1,000+ payers, and millions of appointments, building ML-powered, data-driven infrastructure.

Qualifications

• Lead design and implementation of systems powering insurance operations.
• Build data-intensive ML-powered platforms for patients and providers.
• Mentor engineers and write high-impact code at the intersection of healthcare data and payer operations.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of systems powering insurance operations—patient identification, pricing estimates, provider matching, and claims.
• Build data-intensive ML-powered platforms that serve patients and providers and learn from every visit.

Skills

Platform thinker

Signal in messy data

Hands-on

Own outcomes

Communicate with precision

Tools

TypeScript

Python 3

React

Remix

Next.js

FastAPI

SQLAlchemy

Postgres

Redis

Snowflake

AWS

Temporal

Kafka

Datadog

Sentry

PagerDuty

Cursor

Claude

Gemini

Eddy

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. Headways 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.

Staff Software Engineer (Insurance)

The Work

The Insurance team is the backbone of Headways business. We deliver the two core promises of the platform: affordable therapy covered by insurance for patients, and a simple way to run a therapy practice for providers. Every appointment on Headway flows through systems our team owns — from identifying whether a patient is eligible, to estimating their cost, to matching them with a provider, to submitting a clean claim.

This is a deep and wide problem. We operate across all 50 states, 1,000+ payers, and millions of appointments every month. There's a lot of data to make sense of and signal to find in the noise. As Headways network grows — more patients, more providers, more payers — the accuracy, reliability, and automation of these systems become the difference between a business that scales and one that doesn't.

As a staff engineer in the group, you will lead design and implementation of the systems that power Headways insurance operations — patient identification, pricing estimates, provider matching, and claims. Build data-intensive, ML-powered platforms that serve patients and providers and learn from every visit, mentor engineers, and write high-impact code at the intersection of healthcare data and payer operations.

Some examples of what that work looks like in practice:

• Building a new ML model that lifted price estimate accuracy by 10+ percentage points, getting tens of thousands of patients a better estimate ahead of their first session

• An OCR pipeline to read patient insurance cards, automate eligibility checks, and run ML models to detect complex insurance arrangements — improving onboarding and first-claim success rates

• A claims AI agent that reviews denied claims, identifies root causes, and resubmits autonomously — recovering hundreds of thousands of dollars and proving we can build self-healing systems at scale

• A human-in-the-loop automation that transformed a 20-step manual credentialing process in Google Sheets into an average of 2 days and 1 task — with a record of 6 seconds start to finish — enabling providers to onboard faster and expand their reach to new patients

Our Stack

• Languages: TypeScript, Python 3

• Frontend: React, Remix, Next.js

• Backend & Storage : FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Postgres, Redis, Snowflake

• Infrastructure : AWS, Temporal, Kafka

• Ops: Datadog, Sentry, PagerDuty

• AI Tools : Cursor, Claude, Gemini, Eddy (our in-house cloud agent harness)

Who You Are

• A platform thinker. You build for the teams behind you, not just the immediate use case. You create abstractions that let others move faster and more safely.

• Drawn to signal in messy data. Payer rules vary by state, plan, and policy. You find the structure in the noise and build systems that reason about it reliably.

• Hands-on. You write code where leverage is highest and hold yourself to the same bar you hold others.

• Own outcomes, not tasks. You've been handed ambiguous problems and turned them into shipped software. You know how to define the solution, pull in the right people across teams, and keep things moving when priorities shift.

• Communicate with precision. Whether it's a design doc, a Slack thread, or a cross-team meeting — you bring people along.

Our Interview Process

• Initial screen: You'll connect with someone in recruiting to learn more about the team, Headways mission, and our growth — and we'll get a better sense of your background.

• Tech & Team Fit round: AI Coding and Hiring Manager Chat.

• Final rounds: You'll meet several team members for technical and non-technical interviews and leave with a fuller picture of what it's like to work at Headway.

• References and the offer: Our favorite part of the process. We'll send over all the details, including specifics on employee equity, and congratulatory messages from excited future teammates.

Compensation and Benefits:

The expected base pay range for this position is $224,000-$336,000 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:

[To be included if role is bonus eligible][Other compensation includes: discretionary bonuses and/or commission. Commission payments are monthly.]

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.

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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 to external websites or ask for payment or personal information.