Principal, Clinical Strategy and Execution

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.

About the Role

Headway is looking for a Principal, Clinical Strategy and Execution to own how our clinical organization runs. Our clinical functions — clinical product, clinical quality, patient safety, clinical education, and more — carry a set of standing obligations that grows every quarter: governance committees, the OKR cycle, the clinical policy lifecycle, the clinical risk register, and an expanding portfolio of clinical programs. Today that work is distributed across clinical leaders and subject-matter experts who are also accountable for clinical outcomes. This role creates a single owner for how that governance work is run — while the teams that investigate, audit, and act on provider and patient risk continue to own that work.

You'll be a senior individual contributor who leads through ownership and influence, building governance infrastructure that scales as our network, service lines, and regulatory surface area grow. You will own the operating system that lets the clinical team make fast and clear strategic decisions that keep us aligned with our cross functional partners and the organization. As Headway opens novel referral channels, each one needs clinical protocols, triage and acuity criteria, escalation pathways, and documented standards before it can scale. You'll carry the day-to-day program management — milestones, dependencies, resourcing, escalation, and reporting — while clinical leadership retains clinical decision rights and accountability for clinical content and outcomes. You'll partner with a Senior Clinical Strategy Associate on committee and cadence operations, and work across Compliance, Operations, Data, Product, and more.

If you're a clinician who has built and led clinical programs at scale in a tech-enabled environment, this is a rare chance to design how clinical care is governed as it grows.

You Will

Run clinical governance committee operations: charters, membership, meeting cadence, agendas, pre-reads, minutes, decision logs, and action items driven to closure, in partnership with Clinical Operations and other cross-functional teams

Own the clinical team's operating rhythm: staff meetings, planning sessions, offsites, cross-functional forums, and internal communication

Drive the OKR cycle end to end for the clinical organization: drafting support and calibration, alignment to department and company OKRs, baseline and target setting with data partners, coordination for cross-functional resourcing, mid-cycle check-ins, scoring, and retrospectives; maintain the source of truth and surface off-track objectives early with a recommended path

Own the clinical policy lifecycle end to end: intake, drafting and revision alongside clinical subject-matter experts, review and approval routing, version control, effective dates, scheduled re-review, cross-functional enablement, and the downstream distribution, attestation, and training handoffs, including external-facing policy and regulatory work as directed by clinical leadership

Oversee execution of our clinical programs under the direction of clinical leadership: program plans, milestones, dependencies, and owners; status reporting and escalation; cross-functional coordination; program metrics and outcomes

Systematize the clinical team’s risk register entries as a live instrument within the Headway enterprise risk register: intake and triage of newly identified risks, consistent scoring and documentation, coordinating clinical team involvement in compliance-led audits, assignment of risk owners and mitigations, and reporting to clinical leadership

Act as the primary administrative interface between the clinical team and the departments we work across, including Compliance, Operations, Legal, Product, Growth, and more

You’d Be a Great Fit If You Have

An active clinical license as a master’s level therapist (LCSW, LPC, LMFT), doctorate level clinical psychologist (PhD/PsyD), or other psychiatric clinician (PMHNP-BC, MD/DO), with 7+ years of experience in mental health settings

Comfort with ambiguity and a builder's instinct. You build durable systems from scratch, manage complexity without dropping details, and anticipate and solve problems before they come to clinical leadership's attention

Experience with clinical governance and policy work. For example, supporting committees, moving policies or protocols through review and approval, or contributing to risk, accreditation, or audit processes in a clinical or healthcare setting

Genuine operational excellence and a track record of holding programs to a standard and timeline without formal authority. You've managed concurrent initiatives, and you hold senior clinicians and cross-functional partners to their commitments without jeopardizing the working relationship

A data-informed approach. You set baselines and targets, partner with data teams, and report progress in numbers

Real collaboration skill without formal authority. You inform senior clinicians and cross-functional partners, and you hold people accountable to timelines and commitments without jeopardizing the working relationship

Motivation from the problem. You want to work on one of our generation's defining challenges: access to affordable, high-quality mental healthcare

Compensation and Benefits: