Chief Operating Officer

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, h

Benefits

Additional Information

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.

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