Senior Engineering Manager (Ranking & Relevance)
AI summary of the role
Lead the Ranking & Relevance team at Headway, owning the machine-learned matching systems that connect patients with therapists in a three-sided marketplace.
What you’ll do
- Lead a team of eight engineers (senior software and ML) to build retrieval and learning-to-rank systems for patient-provider matching.
- Shift matching from filter-based to intelligent, outcome-aware ranking using behavioral signals, patient-reported outcomes, and expertise data.
- Resolve the three-sided objective balancing patient conversion, provider activation, and payer efficiency within the ranker.
- Build offline evaluation, monitoring, and drift detection to enable weekly shipping and trustworthy experiment reads.
What you’ll bring
- 4+ years managing engineers, including senior ICs and ML engineers, with a track record of hiring and developing them.
- 5+ years as a software or ML engineer building production systems at scale.
- Hands-on ownership of search, ranking, recommendation, or personalization systems (retrieval, learning-to-rank, feature pipelines, online experimentation).
- Experience in a marketplace or multi-stakeholder product reconciling competing incentives.
Technologies
machine learning · learning-to-rank · retrieval · feature pipelines · online experimentation · search · recommendation systems · personalization · AI tools · system design
About Headway
Headway helps therapists and psychiatrists accept insurance, run their practices, and receive referrals while helping patients and health plans access in-network mental healthcare faster.
Series D · 500–1000 people
Source and classification
Deployment team leadership · Evidence for this classification:
Accel, Spark Capital, etc.), looking for exceptional people to help us achieve this mission. 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 Ranking & Relevance at Headway Every patient who comes to Headway is asking one question: which of these therapists is right for me? Ranking & Relevance owns the answer. We build the retrieval and machine-learned ranking systems that decide which providers a patient sees, in what order, and why - across search, matching and personalization. Headway is a three-sided marketplace, and the engine that powers that marketplace is the match-making system. A good match means a patient who books and stays in care, a provider whose caseload fills with the clients they are genuinely good at, and a payer whose members get effective care. Those goals overlap most of
More from the job description
1 in 4 people in the US have a treatable mental health condition, but most providers don't accept insurance, making therapy too expensive for most people. Headway’s mission is to fix this by building a new mental healthcare system everyone can access. We started by solving the biggest barrier to care: insurance. The admin work - credentialing, claims, payment reconciliation - is a nightmare. We've automated that. But we're going further. Over 75,000 providers across all 50 states run their practice on our software, serving over 1 million patients. We are building the best tools for therapists to run their entire practice, reimagining the experience of finding a therapist, and investing in the platform foundations to enable this at scale. We aren't just a billing layer; we are becoming the platform where care actually happens. We're a Series D company with $325M+ in funding (a16z, Accel, Spark Capital, etc.), looking for exceptional people to help us achieve this mission. 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 Ranking & Relevance at Headway Every patient who comes to Headway is asking one question: which of these therapists is right for me? Ranking & Relevance owns the answer. We build the retrieval and machine-learned ranking systems that decide which providers a patient se [... source excerpt omitted ...] etplace, and the engine that powers that marketplace is the match-making system. A good match means a patient who books and stays in care, a provider whose caseload fills with the clients they are genuinely good at, and a payer whose members get effective care. Those goals overlap most of the time and compete some of the time, and this team owns that tradeoff in code. It is the hardest product problem at Headway, and match quality is not a vanity metric: the gap between a good match and a poor one is the difference between a patient who stays in care and one who gives up on it. Today our matching is still largely filter-based. We are rebuilding it as an intelligent system that [... source excerpt omitted ...] A ranking regression is not a dashboard problem. It changes who gets care, and how soon. About this role We are hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead Ranking & Relevance. You will lead eight engineers today - a mix of senior software and machine-learning engineers. You will partner daily with a staff product manager, two data scientists, and the payer and provider engineering organizations whose outcomes depend on your ranker. This is a domain-depth role, not a span-of-control role. The systems are young enough that your technical judgment will shape them, and consequential enough that a ranking regression is visible to the whole company within days. You will report to
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