Director of Data Science - Patient

Patient

Patients are at the center of Headway’s mission — and analytics plays a critical role in how we serve them. As the Director of Data Science, Patient you will lead the data science organization that helps Headway build an extraordinarily successful consumer brand and patient marketplace, with a relentless focus on measurable growth and patient impact.

Responsibilities

• Partner with product, engineering, and operations to deeply understand the patient journey and identify the highest-leverage opportunities to improve discovery, conversion, and cures.
• Lead the analytics approach for product changes: clarify goals, define success metrics and guardrails, diagnose trade-offs, and ensure learnings drive roadmap decisions.
• Build strong segmentation and cohort understanding to explain who we serve best, where drop-offs happen, and what experiences drive long-term value.
• Own the analytics strategy for consumer acquisition and performance marketing, ensuring we can evaluate channel effectiveness, creative performance, conversion quality, CAC efficiency, and incrementality.
• Partner with Growth Marketing and Finance to improve budget allocation decisions through clear measurement, forecasting inputs, and crisp performance narratives.
• Establish an operating cadence that makes marketing performance, funnel health, and unit economics legible to leaders, and turns weekly learning into action.
• Run a high-velocity learning system
• Create a rigorous experimentation culture across marketing and product, including clear hypotheses, fast iteration loops, strong guardrails, and decision-oriented readouts.
• Create repeatable “insight to action” mechanisms: standardized deep dives, performance narratives, and decision memos that accelerate leadership alignment.
• Scale an elite team
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of data scientists and data science managers; set clear expectations for ownership, communication, and impact.
• Recruit and retain world-class talent and build an org structure that scales from 6 - 8 people to roughly double that size through 2026.
• Create strong managers and tech leads, and create a culture that is rigorous, curious, and relentlessly focused on business outcomes.
• Own standards for truth and clarity
• Define and enforce metric standards across the patient funnel so teams align on what matters and can confidently compare performance over time.
• Ensure stakeholders have trustworthy self-serve reporting and clear definitions, minimizing time spent debating numbers.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in data science/analytics, growth analytics, marketing analytics, product analytics, or data-driven strategy, including 6+ years leading and scaling teams.
• Built analytics that materially improved consumer growth outcomes: acquisition efficiency, conversion, retention, and product-led expansion.
• Strong marketing analytics instincts and can partner credibly with Growth leaders on channels, creative, attribution, and incrementality.
• Can translate messy consumer journeys into clear metrics, crisp narratives, and high-quality decisions, without slowing teams down.
• An exceptional leader and coach with a track record of hiring world-class talent and building high-performance teams.
• Bring intellectual honesty and strong judgment, and can push back when measurement is weak or narratives are wrong.
• Deep expertise in experimentation design, statistical inference, and causal methods such as CUPED, diff-in-diff, synthetic controls, or propensity modeling.
• Experience partnering cross functionally to drive measurable improvements in user experience or product performance.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward action, clarity, and iteration.