Principal, Safety and Risk Management

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.

We're seeking a Principal, Safety and Risk Management to join Headway's Clinical Strategy team and own safety and clinical risk management for our nationwide behavioral health provider network. Behavioral health carries a specific risk profile, including suicide and self-harm risk, violence in the community, medication and controlled substance safety, telehealth crisis management, and handoffs to emergency or higher levels of care. Headway is building the infrastructure to capture and learn from these events. This role is the senior owner who turns that infrastructure into a functioning safety and risk program, and turns what it surfaces into changes in how care is delivered. You will own the operating system for reported safety events end to end (i.e., intake and triage through investigation, systematic event analysis, corrective action, and case closure) and you will be first to respond when a high-risk clinical event needs immediate attention (e.g., an impaired provider actively seeing patients, adverse patient behavior), providing timely, compassionate, evidence-informed support to providers and internal teams. You will set the standards for the program, including harm severity and care attribution coding, investigation processes, and the escalation paths that get a clinical question to a clinician, an operational question to operations, and a legal question to counsel. You will define what Headway measures, own the clinical event risk dashboard, and produce the metrics, trend analysis, and case narrative behind quarterly reporting to clinical leadership and the board. You will partner with the clinical product pod and bring safety and risk management expertise to product development. You'll work cross-functionally with clinical operations, legal, compliance, and data teams. As the function grows, you will shape how it is staffed and how the work is divided. This is an ideal role for a patient safety and clinical risk leader with a behavioral health background who has built a patient safety program, whether in a health system or a technology based health environment, and who wants to define a national safety function while it is still being shaped. You Will Own the operating system for reported safety events end to end, including intake and triage through investigation, systematic event analysis, corrective action, and case closure. Build the reporting culture that surfaces events in the first place. Partner with the clinical safety team to lead the investigation process in the review of serious events, root cause and apparent cause analyses, defining the investigation standards and reference taxonomy the program uses at scale. Convert findings into corrective and preventive actions with named owners and due dates, track every action to verified closure across teams you do not manage, and translate event