Principal, Safety and Risk Management

About the Position

Principal, Safety and Risk Management

Headway is on a mission to revolutionize mental healthcare by building a new system that everyone can access. We're a Series D company with over $325M in funding, and we're looking for an exceptional Principal, Safety and Risk Management to join our Clinical Strategy team.

Location

Remote, United States

Employment Type

Full-time

Compensation

• Estimated Base Salary: $144K – $280K
• Offers Equity

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.

About the Role

We're seeking a Principal, Safety and Risk Management to 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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 trends into upstream fixes that prevent future harm.
• Serve as the trusted responder for high-risk clinical events needing immediate attention, providing timely, compassionate, evidence-informed guidance and support to providers and internal teams.
• Build the protocol and policy layer. Draft and maintain patient safety and event management protocols and policy in partnership with Clinical Operations, Legal, and Compliance.
• Own measurement and the Clinical Risk Dashboard. Define metrics and the baseline safety event rate, and analyze trends in reported events and contributing factors.
• Report to Leadership and the Board. Produce the metrics, trend analysis, and case narrative for the quarterly Quality and Patient Safety Report.
• Build and execute detailed project plans with clinical leadership on new and novel patient safety programs as they arise.

Requirements

• Active clinical license as a master’s level therapist (LCSW, LPC, LMFT), doctorate clinical psychologist (PhD/PsyD), psychiatric clinician (PMHNP-BC, MD/DO), or nurse (RN), with 7+ years of experience in healthcare patient safety or clinical risk management.
• Built or substantially scaled a safety event or clinical risk program.
• Fluent with data. Ability to define metrics, read a dashboard critically, interpret trends, and build a plan for deeper analysis.
• Drive corrective actions to verified closure across teams you do not manage.
• Exceptional communication skills. Ability to document clearly and present findings to senior clinical and business leaders.
• Deep commitment to ethical, patient-centered care, and continuous quality improvement.
• Comfortable being the first person in a role, in a program that is growing, and adaptable with new technology.
• Certification in Quality and Patient Safety, Healthcare Quality and Management, Healthcare Risk Management, or an equivalent patient safety credential - strongly preferred.

We Offer

• Competitive salary range: $144,000 - $280,000
• Equity Compensation
• Medical, Dental, and Vision coverage
• HSA / FSA
• 401K
• Work-from-Home Stipend
• Therapy Reimbursement
• 16-week parental leave for eligible employees
• Carrot Fertility annual reimbursement and membership
• 13 paid holidays each year as well as a Holiday Break during the week between December 25th and December 31st
• Flexible PTO
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Training and professional development

About the Company

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 to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please inform the recruiter when they contact you to schedule your interview.

Headway participates in E-Verify. To learn more, click here.

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.