[Hiring] Principal Software Engineer @Wagmo

Role Description

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.

Our Tech Stack:

• React
• Python
• TypeScript
• React Native
• Kubernetes
• Django
• Next.js
• Node.js
• Flutter (legacy)
• builder.io
• GitHub
• Slack
• Notion
• Claude

Qualifications

• 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.
• A 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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, our partner portal, and consumer authentication.
• Own the architecture of our AI systems across claims adjudication, customer support, and internal engineering tooling.
• Mentor squad tech leads and raise the standard of technical design across the team, without taking on people management.

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