Staff Software Engineer, Developer Productivity and Tooling

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 have

• Experience with different layers of the software stack and understand the different challenges engineers face with platforms and tools they use to build software.
• Experience with some or all of the following technologies: Docker containers, Kubernetes, Terraform, Jenkins, AWS (EC2, S3, ECS).
• Experience with user research methodologies and demonstrated experience understanding user pain points and solving them through generalized platform work.

For candidates living in San Francisco / Bay Area, New York City, or Seattle metros, the expected salary range for the role is currently $245,000 - $290,000. Actual offered salaries will vary and will be based on various factors, such as calibrated job level, qualifications, skills, competencies, and proficiency for the role.