Staff Backend Software Engineer (Revenue Engine)

Join Headway, a mental healthcare startup, as a Staff Backend Software Engineer. In this role, you will shape the technical direction of our Payment Platform and Clearinghouse Platform teams, ensuring the reliability and scalability of our systems. You will lead the design of fault-tolerant integrations, build abstractions and standards for adjacent engineering teams, and mentor senior engineers. This is an opportunity to apply your engineering skills to a mission that matters: improving access to mental healthcare.

• Collaborer avec la direction technique pour définir l'orientation technique des équipes de la plateforme de paiement et de la plateforme de compensation.
• Diriger la conception d'intégrations résilientes et observables avec les services tiers, en construisant des abstractions et des normes pour permettre aux équipes adjacentes de livrer plus rapidement.
• Mentorer les ingénieurs seniors, participer activement à la rédaction de code et façonner l'excellence opérationnelle dans le domaine.
• This role is for engineers who get energized by distributed systems problems with real consequences — concurrency, idempotency, partial failures, all with a substantial potential blast radius — and who want to apply that craft to a mission that actually matters: building a mental healthcare system that everyone can access
• Owns 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
• Communicates with Precision: Whether it's a Slack thread, a design doc, or a cross-team meeting, you communicate clearly and concisely. You know that great engineering is wasted if you can't bring people along
• Mentor by Default: You pull engineers into design discussions without being asked. Your code reviews teach, not just gatekeep. You make sure knowledge gets shared across the team, not siloed in one person's head
• Motivated by Impact: You want your engineering skills applied to problems that matter. Mental healthcare access is broken in America, and you want to be part of fixing it
• Ships Fast, Iterates Faster: You can move from problem statement to working solution quickly. You'd rather ship a good v1 this week than a perfect v1 next month. Real feedback from therapists and patients is worth more than another round of design review
• Sets the Technical Standard: You make technical decisions that optimize for maintainability and scale, not just shipping speed. You proactively improve your team's engineering velocity - whether that's refining tooling, improving automation, or establishing patterns that prevent entire categories of bugs
• End-to-End Product Builder: You care just as much about the API architecture as you do the user experience. You seamlessly context-switch between backend logic and frontend state management
• Quick Study in Complex Domains: Healthcare is a maze of payers, regulations, and exceptions. You don't need prior healthcare experience, but you need to be someone who dives into unfamiliar domains and builds a working mental model fast
• AI Frontier Tinkerer: You don't just use AI tools - you push their limits. You've experimented with applying LLMs to real workflows, whether that's code generation, operational automation, or developer tooling. You bring a builder's mindset: what can we automate, what should stay human, and how do we ship it responsibly in healthcare?