Staff Data Scientist - SEO & Answer Engine Optimization

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 90,000 providers across all 50 states run their practice on our software, serving over 2.6 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, and building much of it with AI. 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 the role

More and more people start their search for a therapist on Google or in an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity. We want Headway to be the most trusted place to research and find mental health care in both. You will be the data scientist who tells us what is working, why, and what to do next.

This is a senior individual contributor role supporting Patient Growth. You will report to a Data Science manager and work hand in hand with cross-functional partners including product, growth marketing, engineering, content, and design. Your core focus is driving new patients from search (SEO) and AI answers (AEO) and the surfaces that drive them: our homepage, directory pages, provider profiles, and earned media (PR, Affiliates, Reddit, YouTube, etc.).

Example questions you will own:

• Which bets are worth making, and how will we know if they worked?

• What should we stop doing because it is not paying off?

• How do we show up and get cited in AI answers?

• When traffic or patients changed, what moved them?

What you will do

• Lead our measurement and testing strategy and execution. Combine our own data (e.g. Google Search Console, clickstream data, bookings) with outside sources (e.g. Ahrefs, agency partners) for a single source of truth. Design matched market and A/B tests.

• Answer key business and product questions. Which bets are worth making, and how will we know if they worked? What should we stop doing because it is not paying off? How do we show up and get cited in AI answers? When traffic or patients change, what drove the change?

• Automate the analysis loop. Build AI agents and workflows to tell us what’s working, what changed, what we should do next. Feed the results back into how we pick and write content.

• Raise the bar. Set standards for how organic growth gets measured across the team, and help partners and agencies separate signals from noise.

What will make you successful

• 10+ years using data science and analytics to drive decisions, with a strong growth background. The industry matters less than the pace: you have worked where things change fast and there is no playbook to follow.

• A growth mindset and a bias to get things done. You set your own priorities, move fast, and tackle the next most important problem.

• You think from first principles. You know what each source can and cannot tell you and the biases they have. You have strong causal inference judgement in messy settings.

• A product mindset. You think past the analysis of what we should do, weigh business trade-offs, and bring new ideas to the table.

• Practical experimentation. You know causal inference and quasi-experiments well, and you weigh rigor against speed and cost. You can decide well without a perfect test.

• Strong SQL and Python. You are comfortable pulling from APIs, modeling in dbt, and building workflows.

• Clear communication.

• You build with AI. You have built agents or automated analysis workflows, you use a tool like Claude Code or Codex every day, and you can tell good AI output from slop. You use AI to cut busywork so you can focus on the hard problems.

• Clear communication. You can explain a messy measurement problem to non-technical partners and executives, and what we can or can’t take away from the data.

Nice to have

• Experience with SEO or AEO at a company where organic was a major channel.

• Experience with marketplaces (i.e. two-sided growth), where we need to balance and match supply and demand

• Experience measuring acquisition quality beyond the first conversion: retention, engagement, and LTV.

• Experience owning or rebuilding a marketing attribution model.

• Experience with search console data, SEO and AEO visibility tools.

• Experience with earned media, affiliate, or community channels and how they affect search and AI visibility.

Comprehensive benefits:

Medical, dental, vision, HSA/FSA, 401(k) including match for 2027!, Carrot Fertility reimbursement, and paid parental, medical and caregiver leave.

We believe a team's strength is in its people, and we cannot achieve this mission without a team that reflects the diversity of this problem – across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, national origin, religion, family status, disability, military status, and experience. Headway is committed to the full inclusion of all qualified individuals. As part of this commitment, Headway will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided with reasonable accommodations. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please inform the recruiter when they contact you to schedule your interview.

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A notice to Headway applicants: To protect yourself against phishing and recruitment fraud, please note that Headway only accepts applications through our official careers page at https://headway.co/careers. Headway will never refer you to external websites, ask for payment or personal information, or conduct interviews via messaging apps. All official communication will come from a @findheadway.com email address. If you are contacted by someone claiming to be from Headway via an unofficial channel, please do not share any information and report it as spam.