Staff Software Engineer, Developer Experience

A home is the biggest investment most people make, and yet, it doesn’t come with a manual. That's why we’re building the only app homeowners need to effortlessly manage their homes —  knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. With Thumbtack, millions of people care for what matters most, and pros earn billions of dollars through our platform. And as one of the fastest-growing companies in a $600B+ industry — we must be doing something right. 

We are driven by a common goal and the deep satisfaction that comes from knowing our work supports local economies, helps small businesses grow, and brings homeowners peace of mind. We’re seeking people who continually put our purpose first: advocating for pros and customers, embracing change, and choosing teamwork every day.

At Thumbtack, we're creating a new era of home care. If making an impact and the chance to do good inspires you, join us. Imagine what we’ll build together. 

Thumbtack by the Numbers

• Available nationwide in all 3,143 U.S. counties
• 75 million projects started on Thumbtack
• 4 million customers in the last 12 months
• Pros earn billions on our platform
• More than 9 million 5-star reviews for our stellar pros 
• 1000+ employees and $3.2 billion valuation (June, 2021) 

About the Developer Experience Team

The Developer Experience team is working to improve engineering efficiency at Thumbtack by reducing friction in our development infrastructure, tooling and processes. We believe in tackling hard problems together as a team, with strong values around collaboration, ownership, and transparency. 

Challenge

Our primary challenge over the next year is to enable our microservice based product architecture to work seamlessly with our development and test systems. As we do this, we also embrace the challenge of staying ahead of the norm by continuing to ensure that Thumbtack’s engineers have the best development platforms and tools at their disposal. Read more about the hard problems that Thumbtack is solving in our engineering blog.

Responsibilities

• Own the definition and realization of the company’s charter across key infrastructure components – build systems, CI/CD, test infra, observability and dev/test environments.
• Optimize performance, improve usability and simplify configuration of developer workflows throughout the development pipeline to production. 
• Collaboratively develop and own engineering best practices across the engineering team, and own the definition and build out the roadmap for developer infrastructure.
• Work closely with engineers across the entire organization – spanning iOS, Android, web and backend – to identify pain points and gaps in systems and tools, and iterate with them on delivering solutions.
• Explore best-in-class and cutting-edge technologies in the industry, evaluate relevance to Thumbtack, and drive adoption of impactful technologies at the company.
• Drive engineering projects to completion, with a tenacious focus on the developer impact of those projects. Prioritize tasks to deliver on goals with a sense of urgency.
• Solve tough technical problems at any level of the stack, and be persistent in getting to the solution, whether it involves front-end, back-end, or infrastructure work.

What you’ll need

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone excited to join the team.

• Minimum of 8+ years of industry experience in software engineering.
• You’re fluent in at least one major programming language and would be able to switch between multiple languages. In our stack, we mainly use Go, Scala, PHP, with React, Next.js, Swift, Kotlin and Java for our web and mobile apps. Our developer tooling is primarily in Python.
• You know what it means to write high quality, maintainable, testable, reliable and performant code, and you enjoy doing it.
• You have experience working on a developer infrastructure team, taking on full or part-time developer experience roles, or have contributed to related open source projects.
• You can break down complex problems rigorously and understand the tradeoffs necessary to deliver great, impactful products.
• You care deeply about developer infrastructure, and have consistently made improvements to the developer ecosystem around you throughout your career.
• You’re curious, you’re data-driven, you love to ask questions, you think critically about problems, and enjoy delivering value to your users and your teammates through your work.

Bonus points if you h