When Arnaud Ferreri joined Headway, he didn’t just want to take a significant next step in his career — he wanted to change people’s lives.
Having experienced firsthand how inaccessible — and life-changing — therapy can be, he wanted to help the organization pursue its mission to make it easier for people to find therapists who accept health insurance. So he did just that by joining the company as chief technology officer.
Ferreri spends his days leading the company’s engineering organization and shaping its technology strategy, which involves confronting — and overcoming — plenty of challenges.
“Building infrastructure that connects patients, providers and insurance companies has us work on both extremes of technical complexity,” he said. “It’s interesting technical work that also happens to serve a meaningful purpose.”
For Ferreri, having the chance to pursue impactful work drove his decision to join his current employer. Similarly, Wyatt Ades decided to become Stepful’s first engineer in an effort to make a difference in the lives of health care professionals specifically.
“I was hooked almost immediately on our sole focus: building a rebellious online learning experience for adults entering the health care field,” the engineering manager said. “Traditional online learning often involves lengthy videos and passive content, but we deliberately broke away from this by building our own learning management system, emphasizing bite-sized, interactive lessons and personalized coaching.”
Ades gets to continuously pursue this mission to help health care professionals thrive while benefiting from Stepful’s startup environment, which fosters growth and peer-to-peer support.
“Working at a startup means we have to break our assumptions often and learn new skills, and it’s great to be able to trust anyone with discovering what it will take to make something happen,” he said.
Ferrari and Ades aren’t the only local technologists who get to unlock impact through their day-to-day work. Below, Ferrari and Ades, along with team members at Place Exchange and Enfusion, share what drew them to their employers, what they enjoy the most about working there and the advice they’d give to job seekers interested in joining their teams.
Headway’s platform connects people with therapists who accept health insurance, making it easier for more people to access mental health care.
What is your role, and what attracted you to Headway? Describe the moment when you knew you’d found the right fit.
As chief technology officer at Headway, I lead our engineering organization and shape our technology strategy. What drew me to Headway was personal; my own experience with therapy showed me how life-changing mental health care can be but also how difficult it can be to access.
I knew this was the right fit during my conversations with the team about their vision. Mental health care runs on outdated, disconnected tech stacks that make life harder for both therapists and patients. At Headway, we’re fixing that. We’re building the infrastructure to connect these broken systems and using AI — especially large language models — to save therapists time and help people find the right provider faster. The team’s mix of technical excellence and real compassion for this problem made it clear to me that this is where I wanted to be.
What's your favorite part about working at Headway?
My favorite part about Headway is the direct impact our work has on people’s lives. When we improve our platform, we’re not just increasing metrics; we’re helping someone find a therapist who might change their life, or helping a provider spend less time on paperwork and more time with patients.
“When we improve our platform, we’re not just increasing metrics; we’re helping someone find a therapist who might change their life, or helping a provider spend less time on paperwork and more time with patients.”
I also love the technical challenges we’re solving. Building infrastructure that connects patients, providers and insurance companies has us work on both extremes of technical complexity. We build optical character recognition for faxes coming from doctors, but we also work on LLMs for patient to therapist matching. It’s interesting technical work that also happens to serve a meaningful purpose.
The team culture is something special, too. Everyone here truly believes in the mission of expanding access to mental health care. That shared purpose creates a lovely environment where people are motivated to solve hard problems together rather than just advance their careers.
What advice would you give to job seekers looking to join your growing team?
Headway is aggressively growing the engineering team by investing in a substantial number of new software engineers. We are solving a generational problem and need the best talent to help us achieve it. If you’re interested in joining us, show us how you think about solving problems, not just your technical skills. We’re building systems that haven’t existed before, so we need people who can navigate ambiguity and find creative solutions.
Also, connect with the mission. Mental health care access is a problem that affects virtually everyone, either directly or through someone they care about. The most successful people on our team are those who understand why this work matters. Finally, be ready to grow. We’re scaling rapidly, which means there are constantly new challenges to tackle and opportunities to expand your impact. The best engineers on our team are those who see problems as opportunities to learn something new.
Stepful is a learning platform dedicated to re-imagining health care training for allied health professionals, such as medical assistants, pharmacy technicians and surgical technologists.
What is your role, and what attracted you to Stepful? Describe the moment when you knew you’d found the right fit.
I originally joined Stepful as the first engineer. Back then, Our Chief Product Officer Tressia, our Chief Technology Officer Edo and I were a three-person product team building the first version of our online school. I was hooked almost immediately on our sole focus: building a rebellious online learning experience for adults entering the healthcare field. Traditional online learning often involves lengthy videos and passive content, but we deliberately broke away from this by building our own learning management system, emphasizing bite-sized, interactive lessons and personalized coaching.
We’ve since scaled to having tens of thousands of monthly active students on our platform and built out our engineering team to over a dozen incredibly talented engineers. I’ve been able to continue to embrace the spirit of continuous growth and have taken on an engineering manager role on our “learning experience” team.
What’s your favorite part about working at Stepful?
The one thing that continues to impress me is the caliber of each person here. We all come from wildly different backgrounds, yet you can trust anyone at the office to take a task and own it from start to finish. Working at a startup means we have to break our assumptions often and learn new skills, and it’s great to be able to trust anyone with discovering what it will take to make something happen.
“We all come from wildly different backgrounds, yet you can trust anyone at the office to take a task and own it from start to finish.”
I saw this scrappiness in action during our latest companywide hackathon. Several new employees, only two weeks into their roles, created end-to-end solutions addressing key pain points for students and staff. For instance, Uttara, our new operations manager, quickly identified that manually personalizing outreach messages was slowing us down. Within a few hours, she had built a functional Chrome extension using large language models, significantly increasing the tone and consistency of our outreach.
What advice would you give to job seekers looking to join your growing team?
Two core values we deeply care about at Stepful are “Care first” and “Own it.” Every day, our goal is ensuring our students not only pass their certification exams but also successfully land jobs. When hiring, I look for people who’ve built user-centric products or experiences. Demonstrating side projects, previous edtech experience or even just a clear passion for outcomes-driven environments goes a long way.
Place Exchange offers a programmatic platform for out-of-home advertising and place-based media that’s designed to help marketers unify planning, buying and measurement.
What is your role, and what attracted you to Place Exchange? Describe the moment when you knew you’d found the right fit.
I’m currently a senior software engineer on the data and analytics team at Place Exchange. Coming from a more traditional adtech background, I was drawn in by the company’s mission of making the out-of-home advertising space programmatic and data-driven. That focus on innovation and data really resonated with me.
I wouldn’t say I had a single “aha” moment but rather a series of experiences that made me realize I’d found the right fit. One example: Place Exchange places a big emphasis on growth and learning. We’ve had mentorship programs where people can pair with senior team members to explore new areas of interest, whether that’s site reliability engineering, data engineering or other disciplines. The culture here is also incredibly supportive. People are always willing to lend their time and expertise, especially in challenging situations. If someone causes an outage or introduces a bug, we emphasize a blameless culture, focusing on quickly resolving the issue and learning how to improve for the future. Lastly, despite being a smaller company, we make a point of embracing modern technologies and best practices rather than doing things the “usual” or “comfortable” way.
What’s your favorite part about working at Place Exchange?
One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Place Exchange is how much the company genuinely wants employees to grow, learn and gain new skills. For me personally, that support has had a huge impact. I actually started at the company as a product manager, but the role wasn’t the right fit or opportunity for me. I was interested in transitioning to software engineering, and the company gave me the opportunity to learn new skills and make that career shift.
Beyond that, Place Exchange actively invests in employee growth. Team members are encouraged to attend major tech conferences, network with industry experts and bring back valuable insights that we can apply to our own platform and development practices. That commitment to learning has been a big part of why I’ve enjoyed my time here so much.
“That commitment to learning has been a big part of why I’ve enjoyed my time here so much.”
What advice would you give to job seekers looking to join your growing team?
My biggest piece of advice is to demonstrate initiative and ownership. Especially at a smaller company like ours, even newer or more junior engineers may find themselves taking the lead on projects. That could mean scoping out an initiative, setting milestones, planning implementation details or breaking down work into manageable tasks.
We’re always looking for people who are curious, proactive and willing to go above and beyond. Showing that kind of drive not only makes a huge impact on our projects but also helps you stand out as a strong potential contributor to the team.
Enfusion’s cloud-native platform is designed to simplify investment management operations by unifying front-, middle- and back-office functions.
What is your role, and what attracted you to Enfusion? Describe the moment when you knew you’d found the right fit.
I am a software developer at Enfusion working on the order management systems product. I had definitely researched the company quite a bit before my interviews and had seen a lot of positive feedback online from both employees and market analysts. From my early interactions with the talent acquisition team, I could feel the firm’s vibrant culture. The most pivotal interaction was with the technical interviewers. Every one of them impressed me with their depth of knowledge, friendliness and openness to accept and discuss various solutions to the problems at hand. This is definitely the kind of environment and team I could see myself working with for a long time.
What’s your favorite part about working at Enfusion?
As an engineering student in college, I always dreamed of joining a tech company. I ended up working for a couple of major global banks for a decade and a half. As I grew into my development and engineering roles, I became captivated by the power of the global markets and the complexities that they entail. I took pride in playing a role in it, however small or big it might have been. But the dream of joining a tech company remained.
Enfusion presents the best of both worlds. It is effectively a tech company that works on exactly those same global markets problems that I had been working on all along. There are a lot of growth opportunities and lots of support all around to help you get there. It is big enough to provide you with all that but not so big as to make you feel lost or forgotten.
“There are a lot of growth opportunities and lots of support all around to help you get there.”
What advice would you give to jobseekers looking to join your growing team?
Keep an open mind, and be ready to learn lots of interesting new things on a daily basis. There is a lot of innovation all over the place, and our content team has done a fantastic job documenting the products. People around you are hardworking yet super helpful and friendly. Things get done very efficiently around here, and that applies to all divisions of the firm. Join us if you are into global markets and are ready to play!
