Staff Backend Software Engineer

The Work

The Revenue Engine Team is making the foundational platform decisions that will shape how Headway moves money — between patients, providers, and payers — at the scale our growing network demands. As one of two staff engineers in the group, you'll partner with engineering leadership to set technical direction across our Payment Platform and Clearinghouse Platform teams: the systems responsible for our integrations with Stripe, Plaid, and the payer clearinghouses that our claims flow through.

This is platform work in the truest sense. Every payment that's charged or paid out, every claim that's filed and reconciled, every dollar that flows through Headway depends on the systems your teams own. As Headway's network grows — more patients, more providers, more payers, more transaction volume — the reliability, throughput, and correctness of these systems become the difference between a business that scales and one that doesn't. Provider trust, patient trust, audit readiness, and revenue capture all hinge on this surface area.

You'll lead the design of fault-tolerant, observable, and deeply reconciled integrations with the third-party services we depend on. You'll build the abstractions and standards that let dozens of adjacent engineering teams — Billing Infrastructure, Patient Billing, Provider Payouts, and others — ship faster and more safely on top of our platform. And you'll do it as a hands-on technical leader: writing code where leverage is highest, mentoring senior engineers across both pods, and shaping the operational excellence that this domain demands.

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.

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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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?