Senior Engineering Manager; Ranking & Relevance

Senior Engineering Manager (Ranking & Relevance)

New York, New York, United States;
San Francisco, California, United States;
Seattle, Washington, United States

Headway’s mission is a big one – to build a new mental health care system everyone can access. We’ve 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 don’t 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, we’ve grown into a diverse, national network of over 60,000 mental healthcare providers across all 50 states who run their practice on our software and have served over 1 million patients. We’re 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.

Join us, and help change mental healthcare for the better.

About the team

The Ranking & Relevance team’s 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 Headway’s growth.

The team sits at the heart of Headway’s 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 Headway’s matching and personalization systems.

You’ll partner closely with product, data, design, and operations leaders to create the foundation for how millions of patients connect with the right therapist. You’ll play a central role in shaping the team’s strategy, technical direction, and culture—helping Headway build the mental healthcare marketplace of the future.

What you’ll do

• Lead and grow a team of software and ML engineers building Headway’s 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 3–5+ 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.

• You’ve built or scaled search or ranking systems from scratch, and understand what excellence looks like across retrieval, relevance, and personalization.

• You’re comfortable managing teams that span ML and software…