About the position
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.
Responsibilities
- 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
Requirements
- 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
Nice-to-haves
- Vercel/Next.js experience
- eCommerce experience
- Experience taking a platform from 0 to 1
- Experience building for a highly regulated industry
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
