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Wagmo is a modern pet healthcare company that partners with employers to provide pet wellness plans, emergency coverage, and 24/7 telehealth guidance. Founded in 2017 and female-founded, the company is headquartered in New York City and serves leading employers nationwide.
As Principal Engineer, you will own Wagmo's application architecture across insurance, claims, partner integration, and AI systems. This is a named architect role reporting to the CTO, with significant technical influence but no direct reports. You will set technical direction, decide what not to build, and create designs that enable two squads to execute independently without escalation.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the end state of the insurance provider interface, including documented retirement paths for legacy models and decisions about dual-write paths
- Design partner and carrier onboarding so new benefits administrators are configuration exercises rather than application builds
- Run architecture review, hold decision rights, and maintain a decision log that unblocks squads without escalation
- Define a unified identity architecture spanning enterprise SSO, partner portal, and consumer authentication
- Own AI systems architecture across claims adjudication, customer support, and internal tooling with versioned prompts, controls, and cost measurement
- Mentor squad tech leads and raise technical design standards across the team
The tech stack includes React, Python, TypeScript, React Native, Kubernetes, Django, Next.js, Node.js, and Claude. The role is wide in scope—there is no platform organization beneath you and no inherited architecture review process beyond what was started this year.
Wagmo is a female-founded, Inc. 5000 recognized company where performance matters more than pedigree. The team is described as exceptionally smart, curious, and kind, led by transparent and low-ego leadership. The company offers genuine flexibility and autonomy in exchange for real dedication and impact.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Experience holding a cross-cutting architectural decision that touched several domains and driving it from ambiguity to a shipped, documented outcome that other engineers built on; ability to name rejected options and accepted costs
- Track record of retiring and scaling systems, not just building them; lived experience in half-migrated codebases running two paths in parallel
- Depth in Python and Django, relational data modeling, and third-party integration at scale
- Familiarity with Kubernetes and GCP (useful but not required to own)
- Experience putting non-deterministic systems into production with opinions about evaluation, versioning, and model behavior control
- Judgment to say what not to build and clarity to carry that argument with senior stakeholders
- Comfort that "principal" means unblocking two squads rather than managing ten
- Experience in insurance, benefits, payments, healthcare, or other regulated, integration-heavy domains is a strong plus
