Principal Engineer

Wagmo is a modern pet healthcare company offering preventive wellness plans, emergency coverage, and 24/7 pet telehealth guidance. As Principal Engineer, you will be the named owner of the application architecture, setting technical direction across insurance, claims, partner integration, and AI systems, deciding what will not be built, and leaving designs that two squads can execute without escalating. The role has no direct reports and includes hands-on work in the codebase.

Responsibilities

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; Own architecture review: run it, hold decision rights in it, and maintain a decision log that the team can rely on; Define a single identity architecture spanning enterprise SSO tenants, partner portal, and consumer authentication, with per-tenant onboarding reduced to a documented, repeatable process; Own the architecture of AI systems across claims adjudication, customer support, and internal engineering tooling, including 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

Requirements

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; Track record of retiring and scaling systems, not just building them; Depth in Python and Django, relational data modeling, and third-party integration at scale; 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

Nice to have

Experience in insurance, benefits, payments, healthcare, or another regulated, integration-heavy domain; Familiarity with Kubernetes and GCP

Benefits

Comprehensive health, vision, and dental coverage; HSA/FSA; 401(k) retirement planning with employer matching; Unlimited paid time off; Annual company holidays; Additional company-wide recharge days off; 12 weeks parental leave for eligible employees; Company paid Wagmo pet wellness and insurance plans; Regular company-wide events and team gatherings; Pet-friendly office; Catered lunches