Principal Engineer, Wagmo
$200-250k
+ Offers Equity
Pet insurance & wellness plans
Be an early applicant
Pet insurance & wellness plans
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$200-250k
+ Offers Equity
21-100 employees
Company mission
To bring pet parents the confidence they need to give pets the care they deserve.
Role
Who you are
- Experience holding a cross-cutting architectural decision that touched several domains at once, and driving it from ambiguity to a shipped, documented outcome that other engineers built on. You should be able to name the option you rejected and the cost you knowingly accepted
- A track record of retiring and scaling systems, not just building them. You have lived inside a half-migrated codebase running two paths in parallel and know what it takes, organizationally as well as technically, to finish
- Depth in Python and Django, relational data modeling, and third-party integration at scale. Familiarity with Kubernetes and GCP is useful; you will not own the cluster
- Experience putting non-deterministic systems into production, with real opinions about evaluation, versioning, and who is allowed to change a model's behavior
- The judgment to say what not to build, and the written and verbal clarity to carry that argument with people who outrank you
- Comfort that "principal" here means unblocking two squads rather than presiding over ten. Experience in insurance, benefits, payments, healthcare, or another regulated, integration-heavy domain is a strong plus
What the job involves
- As Principal Engineer at Wagmo, you will be the named owner of our application architecture
- Wagmo sells pet wellness and insurance directly to consumers and through employers, brokers, and benefits administrators
- Over the past two years we moved our insurance program to a new carrier partner and built a provider-agnostic interface to make that possible
- It works, and it is not finished: two generations of models still coexist behind feature flags, and the legacy path has to be supported for years
- On the partner side, each new benefits administrator we onboard currently arrives as its own build, with its own file format, renewal cadence, and eligibility rules
- Our growth depends on that stopping
- Architecture has been owned by the CTO to date
- This role takes it over
- You will set technical direction across insurance, claims, partner integration, and our AI systems, decide what we will not build, and leave designs that two squads can execute without escalating
- You will do this with no direct reports, real influence, and your hands in the codebase
- The scope here is wide for our team, which is the appeal and also the challenge
- There is no platform organization beneath you and no architecture review process to inherit beyond the one we started this year
- Own the end state of Wagmo's insurance provider interface, including a documented retirement path for legacy provider models and the decision about when dual-write paths come out
- Design partner and carrier onboarding so that adding a new benefits administrator is a configuration exercise rather than an application build. File format, renewal cadence, group structure, and product eligibility should be configured, not coded
- Own architecture review: run it, hold decision rights in it, and maintain a decision log that the team can rely on. Success is squads unblocked without escalation
- Define a single identity architecture spanning enterprise SSO tenants, our partner portal, and consumer authentication, with per-tenant onboarding reduced to a documented, repeatable process that stands up to enterprise security diligence
- Own the architecture of our AI systems across claims adjudication, customer support, and internal engineering tooling: versioned prompts and strategies with a promotion path, controls that match their documentation, and a measured cost per automated decision
- Mentor squad tech leads and raise the standard of technical design across the team, without taking on people management
- Pet spending in the U.S. has reached $200 billion and the category is still early in its lifecycle. Wagmo is building the platform to lead it. This role is the architecture of that platform, at the moment the decisions are still open
- Wagmo is a female-founded, Inc. 5000 recognized company where performance matters more than pedigree. We are growing fast, building something that matters, and there is real ownership equity in that journey
- The team is exceptionally smart, curious, and kind, led by transparent and low-ego leadership. We take the work seriously and never take ourselves too seriously. This is not a traditional 9-to-5 job. It asks for real dedication and impact, and gives you genuine flexibility and autonomy in return
Our take
Wagmo is a pet wellness company with a tech-first approach, designed to cater to the needs of new pet parents with a range of wellness and insurance plans. The company provides two primary pet health plans: Wagmo Insurance for emergency care and Wagmo Wellness for routine pet maintenance.
Backed by the National Speciality Insurance Company, Wagmo connects pet parents with budgeting tools, reliable veterinary care providers, and trustworthy advice, ensuring pets receive the care they deserve. These are provided to individuals on subscription or as an employee benefit through the workplace.
Wagmo has made a number of impressive partnerships, such as with online pet care marketplace Rover, to extend its reach and influence. Most recently it teamed up with Curql, who also made a strategic investment in the company. This opens up a new channel through which Wagmo can deliver pet insurance, wellness reimbursements and 24/7 virtual veterinary care to credit unions and their members.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-3% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Aug 2023
$8.9m
EARLY VC
Jul 2021
$12.5m
SERIES A
Total funding: $24.4m
Company benefits
- Equity in the company
- Company paid medical premiums for employee-only plan (3 out of 4 medical plans)
- Dental, vision, voluntary life, short term disability and long-term disability
- Commuter assistance
- Company paid Wagmo pet wellness and insurance plans through monthly reimbursement
- Unlimited paid time off
- 12 weeks parental time off
- 401k
- Company wide open feedback model
Company HQ
Greenwich Village, New York, NY
Leadership
Christie Horvath
(CEO & Co-Founder)Graduated from Harvard Business School with a Master of Business Administration. Served as the Vice President of BlackRock for 6 years before founding Wagmo.
Alison Foxworth
(Advisor & Co-Founder)Graduated from The Wharton School with a Master of Business Administration. Previously worked in Advisory Services and Financial Insurance at BlackRock. Also served as the Director at Garrison Investments Group.
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