Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer
About Headway
Headway’s mission is to build a new mental healthcare system everyone can access. We started by automating the administrative work of insurance, and now serve over 1 million patients across all 50 states.
Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer
The Data Platform team builds and owns our Snowflake data warehouse, data ingestion tooling, AWS infrastructure, CI/CD, and data developer experience. We are looking for a Staff Data Infrastructure Engineer to architect, lead, and evolve the foundational systems that power our entire data organization.
- Architect, lead, and evolve foundational systems for the data organization
- Drive technical strategy and cross-functional alignment
- Define roadmaps for a data platform or infrastructure domain
- Lead technical initiatives end-to-end across multiple teams
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers
Who You Are
A technical leader who combines deep infrastructure expertise with the organizational instincts to drive alignment across teams. You thrive in ambiguity, operate with a high degree of ownership, and are as comfortable setting technical direction as you are building.
Experience We're Seeking
- 10+ years as a Data Platform Engineer, Software/Infrastructure Engineer specializing in data, or Data Engineer in a high-code, high-scale environment
- Track record of driving technical strategy and cross-functional alignment, including defining roadmaps for a data platform or infrastructure domain
- Deep expertise building full-stack data platforms: data warehousing, ingestion pipelines, orchestration, monitoring and alerting, CI/CD, developer tooling, cloud infrastructure, and third-party integrations
- Architectural fluency in warehouse design patterns, performance tuning, cost management, and permissions strategies on MPP analytics databases (Snowflake strongly preferred; Databricks, BigQuery, or Redshift also relevant)
- Experience leading technical initiatives end-to-end across multiple teams and codifying engineering standards
- Proficiency designing and operating cloud infrastructure at scale (AWS preferred) using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, AWS CDK)
- Strong Python engineering skills; solid SQL foundations; comfort with distributed systems
- Experience maintaining and scaling pipeline orchestration infrastructure (Airflow/Astronomer preferred)
Bonus Points
- Agentic Data Engineering (automating data infrastructure tasks, auditing permissions, optimized CI)
- APM and observability tooling (DataDog, New Relic) and data quality/observability frameworks
- ETL/ELT best practices at scale
- Data security and compliance in regulated environments, especially PHIG
- Docker, GitHub Actions, dbt, Spark
- Build vs. buy decision-making and vendor evaluation
What You'll Love
If you want to set technical direction for data infrastructure at a company redefining access to mental healthcare, serve as a force multiplier, make data engineers, analysts, and ML practitioners more effective through the systems and standards you put in place, own consequential architectural decisions from whiteboard to production, build in a fast-paced environment where we ship multiple times per day and measure impact quickly, and help shape Headway's engineering culture, processes, and documentation with the same rigor we bring to our products, then this role is for you.
Compensation And Benefits
The expected base pay range for this position is $212,000 - $265,000, based on a variety of factors including qualifications, experience, and geographic location. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for 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.