Staff Backend Software Engineer

About the role

You will own the design and execution of the core payment and claims infrastructure that powers Headway's revenue engine. You will partner directly with engineering leadership to define the technical direction for the Payment Platform and Clearinghouse Platform teams, ensuring they can reliably move money between patients, providers, and payers. You will architect and implement fault-tolerant integrations with critical third-party services such as Stripe, Plaid, and national payer clearinghouses. You will establish the abstractions and standards that allow multiple adjacent engineering pods to build and ship features faster and with greater confidence. You will act as a hands-on technical leader, writing high-leverage code and mentoring senior engineers across both product streams. You will solve complex distributed systems problems like concurrency, idempotency, and partial failures that have real financial and operational consequences. This role is for an engineer who wants to apply their craft to a mission that fundamentally changes access to mental healthcare for everyone in the United States.

Key facts

What you'll do

Define and lead the architecture of the payment platform that processes every transaction, claim, and reconciliation across Headway's network of over 75,000 providers.

Design and implement deeply reconciled workflows for claims submission and payment settlement to ensure financial correctness and audit readiness at scale.

Build and maintain resilient integrations with Stripe, Plaid, and payer clearinghouses to support the full revenue cycle from eligibility to payout.

Establish platform abstractions and standards that enable billing infrastructure, patient billing, and provider payouts teams to ship features safely and rapidly.

Lead fault-tolerant system design that handles high concurrency, ensures idempotency, and contains blast radius during partial failures in production.

Mentor senior engineers across both pods through code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing to elevate the entire engineering organization.

Write high-leverage code where it matters most, balancing shipping speed with long-term maintainability and operational excellence.

Champion observability, monitoring, and debugging tooling to provide clear insight into transaction flows and system health for rapid issue resolution.

Collaborate closely with product and leadership to translate ambiguous business requirements into robust technical solutions that scale with network growth.

Drive the technical standards that keep Headway's financial platform secure, reliable, and aligned with evolving regulatory and audit expectations.

Requirements

You must have experience designing and operating backend systems that handle financial transactions and third-party integrations at scale.

You must be proficient in TypeScript and Python 3, with a strong understanding of backend frameworks, data modeling, and API design.

You must have hands-on experience with relational databases and distributed storage systems such as Postgres, Redis, and Snowflake in production environments.

You must have deep experience with AWS infrastructure, including managed services for compute, storage, messaging, and orchestration.

You must have practical experience building and operating event-driven systems using tools like Kafka and workflow engines such as Temporal.

You must have a strong track record of building and maintaining observability using Datadog, Sentry, and PagerDuty to ensure system reliability.

You must be comfortable navigating complex, ambiguous domains such as healthcare regulations, payer rules, and payment processing constraints.

You must be a self-driven learner who can rapidly build a mental model of new systems and own outcomes without detailed direction.

Nice to have

Experience building platforms that serve multiple internal engineering teams and need to balance competing priorities.

Background in billing, payments, or healthcare revenue cycle management.

Contributions to open source or public systems that demonstrate strong engineering craftsmanship.

Practical notes

This role is based in New York, NY, and requires in-office presence.

Travel is not required for this position.

Employment is contingent on successful completion of standard background checks.

Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without sponsorship for this role.