Senior Engineering Manager (Ranking & Relevance)

Headways mission is a big one to build a new mental health care system everyone can access. Weve built technology that helps people find great therapists with the first software-enabled national network of providers accepting insurance.

1 in 4 people in the US have a treatable mental health condition but the majority of providers dont accept insurance making therapy too expensive for most people. Headway is building a new mental healthcare system that everyone can access by making it easy for therapists to accept insurance and scale their practice.

Headway was founded in 2019. Since then weve grown into a diverse national network of over 60000 mental healthcare providers across all 50 states who run their practice on our software and have served over 1 million patients. Were a Series D company with over $325m in funding from a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) Accel GV (formerly Google Ventures) Spark Capital Thrive Capital Forerunner Ventures and Health Care Service Corporation.

We want your time here to be the most meaningful experience of your career. Join us and help change mental healthcare for the better.

About the team

The Ranking & Relevance teams mission is to help every patient find the right provider for their needs. We are building the matching systems that power this connection from search and discovery to ranking and personalization. Our goal is to combine cutting-edge machine learning with robust product engineering to deliver a search experience that balances incentives for patients providers payers and Headways growth.

The team sits at the heart of Headways marketplace owning the technology that determines how patients discover and connect with therapists. This means working at the intersection of user experience marketplace design and applied machine learning.

About the role

We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead and grow our Ranking & Relevance engineering organization. This role is ideal for a leader who has built search ranking or recommendation systems and knows what good looks like in these domains. You will guide a cross-disciplinary team of software and machine learning engineers to design build and scale Headways matching and personalization systems.

Youll partner closely with product data design and operations leaders to create the foundation for how millions of patients connect with the right therapist. Youll play a central role in shaping the teams strategy technical direction and culturehelping Headway build the mental healthcare marketplace of the future.

What youll do

• Lead and grow a team of software and ML engineers building Headways search ranking and personalization systems.
• Define and drive the technical strategy for how patients discover and connect with providers from search retrieval to model-driven ranking.
• Partner with cross-functional leaders to translate business objectives into measurable outcomes that improve matching relevance patient conversion and business growth.
• Build and scale reliable search infrastructure leveraging technologies such as Elasticsearch and modern ML pipelines.
• Mentor and develop engineers and emerging leaders fostering a culture of technical excellence curiosity and accountability.
• Collaborate with peers across Engineering Product and Data Science to define success metrics design A/B experiments and continually improve model and product performance.
• Contribute to broader engineering leadership efforts as Headway continues to scale its systems and teams.

Who you are

• You have 35 years of engineering management experience leading high-performing software or ML engineering teams ideally in ranking search or recommendation systems.
• You have 5 years of prior experience as a software or ML engineer building large-scale distributed systems or ML-powered products.
• Youve built or scaled search or ranking systems from scratch and understand what excellence looks like across retrieval relevance and personalization.
• Youre comfortable managing teams that span ML and software engineering bridging disciplines to deliver cohesive user-impacting systems.
• Youre a strong cross-functional partner who can balance competing marketplace incentives aligning patient provider and business goals into a coherent technical vision.
• You bring product intuition to your technical leadership caring deeply about the user experience and long-term system outcomes.
• You foster a culture of learning psychological safety and high performance developing your team into thoughtful builders and decision-makers.

Nice to have

• Experience building and scaling systems using Elasticsearch or similar search technologies.
• Prior experience in health tech marketplaces or other highly regulated multi-sided domains.
• Exposure to ML infrastructure such as model deployment retraining pipelines and monitoring tools.
• Familiarity with modern ranking and personalization approaches (e.g. embeddings vector search or reinforcement learning for recommendations).

Our interview process

After you apply to Headway here are some details of what to expect during the interview process.

• Initial screen: Youll connect with someone in recruiting so you can learn more about the team Headways mission and exciting growth and we can get a better idea of your background.
• First rounds: Youll meet with an engineering leader on the team to go deeper into your team and people leadership experiences and complete one technical (systems design) interview.
• Final rounds: Youll meet team members across product and engineering leadership for multiple behavioral interviews leaving you with a fuller picture of what its like to work at Headway.
• References and the Offer: Our favorite part of the process! Well send over all of the details including specifics on employee equity and congratulatory messages from excited future team members!

Compensation & Benefits:

The expected base pay range for this position is $234600 - $276000 based on a variety of factors including qualifications experience and geographic addition to base salary this role may be eligible for performance-based variable compensation and 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:
• Equity compensation
• Medical Dental and Vision coverage
• HSA / FSA
• 401K
• Work-from-Home Stipend
• Therapy Reimbursement
• 16-week parental leave for eligible employees
• Carrot Fertility annual reimbursement and membership
• 13 paid holidays each year as well as a Holiday Break during the week between December 25th and December 31st
• Flexible PTO
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Training and professional development

We believe a teams 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.

Headway participates in E-Verify. To learn more click here.