Staff Software Engineer (Payer)

Join Headway, a mental healthcare access platform, as a Staff Software Engineer (Payer) in the Payers & Outcomes team. You will work at the intersection of machine learning, clinical quality, and trust, building intelligent systems that protect the integrity of our network and improve the quality of care. Your work will have a real impact on mental healthcare access in America.

• Architect and develop LLM-powered systems for clinical documentation review and real-time feedback to providers.
• Design and implement ML/LLM systems to detect patterns of inappropriate billing and low-quality care across healthcare claims.
• Build systems to systematically review prescribers against clinical quality standards and measure, improve, and defend the quality of care.
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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?
• 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
• There is no onsite requirement, but engineers should be located in these regions. There are offices in these 3 cities for anyone interested in in-office time