Principal Engineer

About Loyal

Loyal is a clinical-stage veterinary medicine company developing drugs intended to extend the lifespan and healthspan of dogs. Our mission is to help dogs live longer, healthier lives.

We’ve already achieved significant milestones on our path to earning FDA approval for the first lifespan extension drug for any species. We have three products in our pipeline and are on track for FDA conditional approval within the next year.

Loyal is a well-funded startup in growth mode. Our team includes scientists, veterinarians, engineers, operators, and creatives. This role will play a key role in supporting our growth strategies.

About the role

As a Principal Engineer at Loyal, you’ll play a pivotal role in building an eCommerce experience that will serve as the digital cornerstone of our relationship with both veterinarians and dog owners. This platform is not just a storefront – it’s mission-critical and directly supports our goal of helping dogs live longer, healthier lives.

In this role, you’ll drive architecture and development efforts across the stack, balancing high-velocity execution against long-term platform scalability and maintainability. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to understand evolving business needs, and translate them into thoughtful technical solutions, making key architectural decisions to drive impact and speed-to-market.

You’ll be expected to toggle between hands-on coding, high-level architectural planning, and strategic conversations with senior leadership. You’ll also serve as a trusted technical voice for our partners and customers, contributing to our reputation as a world-class technology organization in the pet health space.

You will be reporting to our VP of Engineering. 

Your daily work will include:

• Drive the development of our eCommerce platform, diving in across the stack (Next.js, TypeScript, React, Postgres/Neon, Medusa.js, Vercel, AWS, Terraform, K8s)
• Guide the architecture of the system as it evolves with a focus on simplicity, scalability, and speed-to-market
• Understand business context when making technical decisions, and clearly articulate the business impact of those decisions to senior leaders
• Build and nurture strong relationships with key technical contacts at customers and third-party partners
• Continually steer the organization towards best practice tooling and techniques
• As part of an on-call rotation, ensure the platform meets or exceeds agreed on SLAs
• Develop and support internal tools, helping our clinical research teams and improving company operations
• Work collaboratively with team members from many different professional disciplines in a fast-paced and ever-changing environment

About You:

• 12+ years software development experience, with at least 4 years in technical leadership roles
• Strong full-stack coding abilities demonstrated with modern TypeScript/React frameworks
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced startup environment with a small, dynamic team
• Able to clearly articulate the key business drivers of the companies you’ve worked in
• Excited to jump between hands-on coding, high-level architecture and strategy discussions
• Demonstrated experience shepherding a product through a period of rapid scaling
• Career spent using modern tooling and techniques
• Not required, but a plus:
• Vercel/Next.js experience
• eCommerce experience
• Experience taking a platform from 0 to 1
• Experience building for a highly regulated industry

Loyal benefits:

• Full-coverage health insurance — medical, dental and vision — for you and your dependents
• $1,000 home office equipment stipend
• $1,200/year learning budget for books, courses, etc.
• $250/month wellness budget for gym, cleaners, spa, food, etc.
• All 3-day weekends are turned into 4-day weekends 🎉
• Unlimited vacation and paid holidays
• Paw-ternity leave — adopt a dog and get a day off with your new family member 🐶
• Competitive salary
• Company equity options grant for new hires

Salary Range: $192,000 - $263,000

Loyal is founded and led by a first-gen female CEO and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate against applicants based on gender, race or color, ethnicity or national origin, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or any other applicable characteristics protected by law. 

Our values

Lean into moonshots

We don’t settle for incremental change. We have the bravery to take risks and shoot for the impact we want to have.

Opportunity is at the intersection

We lean into combining disciplines, expertises, and perspectives not normally adjacent. We design our organization to facilitate cross-pollination and cross-collaboration. We reject silos.

Expertise without ego

Titles do not determine who has a voice. We work on hard technical problems and have a ton of fun while at it.

Learning by doing

Our path is novel and many things we are doing have never been done before. We lean into MVPs and are open to unexpected outcomes.

Lead with context

We value leading with context. We equip people with the context and background necessary to make their own decisions and act in the best interest of Loyal. We empower teams to succeed.

Empathy and respect for all life

Our patients are not just numbers. Our work is intentional, thoughtful, and guided by respect for life. We take our responsibility to pets and pet parents seriously.