Chief Operating Officer

About Loyal

Loyal is a clinical-stage veterinary medicine company developing longevity drugs for dogs. Our mission is to help dogs live longer, healthier lives.

We're pioneering a new category of veterinary prescription drugs that proactively and preventatively target the underlying drivers of aging, delaying the onset of disease and preserving quality of life as dogs age. We've already made significant progress in our mission to develop the first FDA-approved drugs to extend canine lifespan: as of early 2026 we've completed two of three major FDA review sections for our lead program, LOY-002, and are targeting submission of the third and final section later this year.

Loyal is a well-funded startup with teams of scientists, veterinarians, engineers, operators, and creatives. You'll help us continue on our path of earning FDA approval for the first lifespan extension medicine for any species, and change what's possible for the dogs we love.

About the role

Loyal is hiring a Chief Operating Officer. This is a hands-on leadership role at a company that has closed a $100M Series C, is advancing three+ pipeline programs, and is targeting commercial launch of its first product LOY-002 in 2027.

You will own Finance, People, Engineering, Program Leadership, Commercial, Customer Service, and the internal operating system that runs the company.

The right person has stood up operating systems in startups before, has the confidence and conviction to push back on a founder/CEO, and can credibly hold a commercial projections debate, a product review, and a supply chain negotiation session in the same week.

Your daily work will include

• Owning the operational execution of Loyal's first commercial launch in 2027 - partnering with organizations including Commercial, CMC/Supply Chain (under the CTOO), Veterinary Medicine, and Creative to ensure a launch that performs commercially and earns a brand customers love.
• Leading Finance, People, Program Leadership, Commercial, Customer Service, and both Commercial and Internal/Platform Engineering. You will directly manage the leaders running each function, and build/scale the organizations where the organization is not yet built out.
• Scaling the company from ~70 to ~150 people with AI-leveraged efficiency — headcount growth gated to commercial milestones, not arbitrary expansion. Deploying AI tooling across ops, finance, recruiting, and customer service so leverage scales with the team.
• Iterating and owning the operating cadence the company runs on — goals system, weekly and monthly business reviews, and the board prep cadence.
• Owning the seam between commercial demand and technical supply — running the S&OP cadence with the CTOO so the CEO is not the integrator on day-to-day operational decisions.
• Leading product distribution platform buildout for a very complicated and regulated flow (prescription drug distribution), in collaboration with our engineering and commercial leadership.
• Building a customer service organization that scales with launch and that creates a pharma brand customers genuinely love.
• Acting as the company-wide problem solver — proactively identifying and resolving operational issues across functions before they become roadblocks.
• Freeing the CEO to focus ~80% of her time on external work (board, investors, partnerships, science narrative, brand) by the time of launch.

About you

• 10+ years of operating experience at high-growth startups where you've directly built and scaled the operations function through inflection points, including at least one company in the 50–300 headcount range.
• Both startup AND scale experience. You've built v1 systems from scratch and iterated them to v3 — not pure startup, not pure big-co.
• Technical credibility. You've led engineering, data, or other technical disciplines that you weren't personally an expert in. You can explain complex ideas simply and hold credibility in technical reviews. Bio background is not required but you should be excited to build basic bio and drug development fluency.
• Commercially literate. You will manage our existing Commercial executive and help build the team around them. You don't need a career commercial background, but you do need to credibly challenge and coach commercial leadership. You should have good taste or be self-aware that you do not - and be able to hire around that.
• First-principles thinker. You drill quickly to the load-bearing question in disciplines you don't fully know yet.
• Low ego, high confidence, high integrity. You suppress your ego to execute the founder's vision, and you have the bravery to push back when you think she's wrong.
• AI-leveraged operator. You use AI tools in your own workflow today and have a point of view on deploying them across the org for compounding leverage.
• Concise, high-information-density communicator. You write well and default to async written briefs over meetings.
• Strong manager and developer of people. You set clear expectations, hold people accountable, and your direct reports get measurably better at their jobs within months. You do not shy away from giving direct feedback quickly and are impatient with mediocre performance in yourself and your team. You are not corporate.
• High agency, exceptional follow-through. You track many disparate things at once and nothing falls through. You build systems and processes that outlast you. You work hard.
• Mission-aligned. Whether for dogs, longevity, building an aging pharma, or building a consumer pharma brand people love — this matters to you for reasons that pre-date this job posting.

Preferred attributes

• Experience supporting a first commercial launch at a VC-backed biotech, medical device, or other regulated atoms business.
• Background in or adjacent to veterinary or animal health, consumer health pharma, or a DTC business with a regulated product.
• Track record of building a function 0→1 and intentionally handing it off to a specialist leader as the org matured.
• Cat lovers accepted.

Why you may not be a fit

• You have no experience operating without enterprise infrastructure and have never built a function from scratch with no team and no playbook.
• You lean towards heavy processes and have a playbook that you have utilized at multiple companies.
• You have not worked closely with non-engineering technical staff (scientists, doctors, veterinarians, etc).
• You want a well-defined role - this role is broad, messy, and high-ownership by design.
• You don't use AI in your own work today and don't have a strong view on how to deploy it.
• You are not comfortable leading and operating in a milestone-based, pre-revenue business for 12-24 months
• You are not comfortable operating in a remote-first environment or traveling regularly to visit our distributed team.

Salary Range: $315,000 - $425,000

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

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

Moonshots, derisked methodically

Bringing the first longevity drug to market is an extremely difficult technical and social pursuit. To achieve this we must take bigger bets than the field has historically made, paired with the technical rigor to de-risk them step by step. We plan on both short and extremely long timescales, and we have the conviction to see our vision through to success or failure.

Opportunity is at the intersection

We lean into combining disciplines, expertise, 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 push back on each other, ask questions instead of issuing orders, and try to prove ourselves wrong. We are emotionally attached to the outcome, not our personal hypotheses, and welcome being challenged instead of treating it as a threat.

High agency, high humility

Most of what we're doing has never been done before, so we can't rely on established precedents to guide our way. We move forward to generate clarity, build strategies resilient to the fact that we don't know what we don't know, and design small experiments where we can fail safely, without jeopardizing the bigger mission.

Lead with transparency and context

We proactively and consistently share the why behind our strategy — not just the what — because we believe sharing context enables great people to make great decisions.

Empathy and respect for all life

Our patients are not just numbers. We deeply respect the value of every life, large and small and take our ethical responsibility to the families we treat extremely seriously.

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