Senior Software Engineer, Babylist
CA$294.3-366.4k
OTE
CA$255.9-318.6k
BASE
Online universal baby registry
Be an early applicant
Online universal baby registry
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
CA$294.3-366.4k
OTE
CA$255.9-318.6k
BASE
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help expecting parents get exactly what they need for the arrival of their new baby.
Role
Who you are
- You've been shipping production systems for years, and you've got the judgment to show for it. You can pick up an ambiguous problem and start moving before anyone hands you the full picture
- The strongest Senior engineers here are generalists, and usually the most prolific builders on their team. You go wherever the problem leads: a backend service one week, a stubborn frontend bug the next, the data pipeline after that. When it's hard you dig in, and you learn unfamiliar parts of the stack fast. Range is the Senior signature
What the job involves
- As a Senior Engineer at Babylist, you take on hard problems and own them end-to-end. Millions of families depend on what we build. Agents write most of the code now. So the hard part is yours: what to build, how it should work and whether what shipped was right. You're still in the code for the genuinely hard problems. Agents handle the volume. You spend your time on the parts that need a person
- We're building well beyond the registry now: the financial side of raising a kid, maternal health made simpler and more human, the education new parents are looking for and the community around them. The hard problems run across all of it, plus the platform underneath and the AI we already ship to families
- You'll start on a team, but you won't be boxed into it. The roadmap is open, your scope grows as you do and you have a say in what you take on next. Senior here means owning whole problems; Staff is the next step up, setting direction across a domain
- A Senior Engineer here owns problems, not just features. You're handed an outcome, you decide what to build, ship it and own whether it worked. You act on incomplete information and change course fast when the evidence says you were wrong
- What you do depends on what the team needs:
- Frame the problem with your PM as a peer, run the experiment and bring customer evidence into what gets built
- Harden a critical path, kill a class of incidents or design the abstraction your team builds on
- Be the reviewer people want on the risky changes
- Manage up with crisp choices: raise the risks early and protect the right tradeoffs
- Share what you're learning about AI openly, so the whole team gets sharper
- A few problems people at this level are working on right now:
- Deciding what the registry recommends to each family, from the ranking to the model behind it, and proving in a live experiment that it actually helps
- Building the evals system that catches our AI support agent making things up before a customer does
- Making a child's info one source of truth instead of five disconnected flows, so parents set it up once and new products like Early Investor build on it
- The Stack:
- Core app: Rails, Packwerk, React, TypeScript, Sidekiq
- Mobile: iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin)
- Data, search & events: MySQL, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, Weaviate, WarpStream, Hex, Sigma
- Machine learning: deep learning, matrix factorization, retrieval & ranking, AWS SageMaker, MLflow
- AI & dev tooling: Claude Code, Devin, Linear, CodeRabbit, Warden, LangChain, Bedrock AgentCore, Maxim
- Infra & ops: AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions, Datadog, incident.io, LaunchDarkly
- Key integrations: Shopify (payments), Iterable (CRM)
Application process
- Recruiter conversation (30 minutes). Trade context: what you want next, what we're building and straight answers on comp, team and remote
- Technical screen (1 hour). One round, no AI, language-agnostic. Reach for Google when you normally would. We just want to see how you reason from first principles
- Final round (4 hours). Four one-hour interviews: system design, AI-assisted coding with the tools you'd actually use here, product sense and culture and values. You'll hear back either way within 24 to 48 hours
Our take
Since its 2011 launch, Babylist has grown into one of the most highly rated baby registries in the US. The difference it offers is that it allows users to include products from any store in their registries. On top of this, the company’s model also focuses heavily on creating informational content, which allows it to generate ad revenue while building customer loyalty.
Originally scaled with fairly low venture funding, Babylist claims half of new parents in the US now use its services. This, given that the baby products industry is worth close to $90 billion, shows the company's immense growth and speaks to the impact it has made in the space.
Babylist has seen strong funding in the past, which has fuelled projects such as the launch of virtual showrooms and further expanded the company's presence. The company acquired Expectful, a health and wellness tool, in 2023 with the long-term vision of combining the two companies into a larger health and wellness media property that can help people navigate all aspects of parenthood from fertility to diapers.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
67% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (1 round)
Nov 2021
$40m
SERIES C
Total funding: $40m
Company benefits
- HAPPIER WEEKENDS – We work to live, not live to work. That means we generally don’t work nights or weekends, and we offer 10 paid holidays throughout the year, in addition to your paid time off.
- PAID TIME OFF THAT WORKS FOR YOU – Life is unpredictable. Use your time off for what you need, whether that’s a vacation, family event or a day to unplug.
- PARENTAL LEAVE – We offer a flexible, 12-week paid parental leave policy.
- FLEXIBLE BENEFITS – Choose from benefits that support your working style, whether that's remote, in the office or something in between.
- HEALTH & WELLNESS – Wellness benefits include 100% paid coverage for medical, vision and dental for full-time employees.
- BABYLIST STORE DISCOUNT – All full-time employees receive a generous Babylist Store discount.
Company HQ
Emeryville, CA
Leadership
Natalie Gordon
(Founder & CEO)Former Software Engineer at Amazon. Initially founded Babylist as a side project and has since taken the company to a market leading status.
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