Senior Engineering Manager (Ranking & Relevance)

3–5+ years of engineering management experience leading high-performing software or ML engineering teams, ideally in ranking, search, or recommendation systems. 5+ years of prior experience as a software or ML engineer, building large-scale distributed systems or ML-powered products. Built or scaled search or ranking systems from scratch, and understand what excellence looks like across retrieval, relevance, and personalization. Comfortable managing teams that span ML and software engineering, bridging disciplines to deliver cohesive, user-impacting systems. Strong cross-functional partner who can balance competing marketplace incentives, aligning patient, provider, and business goals into a coherent technical vision. Product intuition to technical leadership, caring deeply about the user experience and long-term system outcomes. Foster a culture of learning, psychological safety, and high performance, developing your team into thoughtful builders and decision-makers. Experience building and scaling systems using Elasticsearch or similar search technologies (nice to have). Prior experience in health tech, marketplaces, or other highly regulated, multi-sided domains (nice to have). Exposure to ML infrastructure such as model deployment, retraining pipelines, and monitoring tools (nice to have). Familiarity with modern ranking and personalization approaches (e.g., embeddings, vector search, or reinforcement learning for recommendations) (nice to have).

Lead and grow a team of software and ML engineers building Headway’s search, ranking, and personalization systems. Define and drive the technical strategy for how patients discover and connect with providers, from search retrieval to model-driven ranking. Partner with cross-functional leaders to translate business objectives into measurable outcomes that improve matching relevance, patient conversion, and business growth. Build and scale reliable search infrastructure, leveraging technologies such as Elasticsearch and modern ML pipelines. Mentor and develop engineers and emerging leaders, fostering a culture of technical excellence, curiosity, and accountability. Collaborate with peers across Engineering, Product, and Data Science to define success metrics, design A/B experiments, and continually improve model and product performance. Contribute to broader engineering leadership efforts as Headway continues to scale its systems and teams.