Staff Software Engineer, Thumbtack
Backend Infrastructure
$212.5-323.4k
Salary dependent on location
Local services marketplace app
Be an early applicant
Local services marketplace app
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$212.5-323.4k
Salary dependent on location
1001+ employees
Company mission
Thumbtack's mission is to help homeowners care for their homes, all the way from minor retouching to fundamental remodelling projects.
Role
Who you are
- Experience owning and improving CI/CD systems for large, shared codebases
- Strong proficiency with Go and familiarity with Go build, test, and verification workflows
- Experience improving developer experience through tooling, workflow design, or platform standards
- Ability to diagnose and address systemic reliability and performance issues in infrastructure systems
- Experience working in shared ownership environments and establishing clear platform boundaries
- Ability to operate with focused scope and deliver high-leverage improvements as an early member of a new team
- Comfort working on platform-oriented problems rather than feature-oriented product work
What the job involves
- The Backend Infrastructure team is a new team within Platform Engineering, created to establish clear ownership and sustained investment in backend platform infrastructure
- The team focuses on improving the reliability, performance, and developer experience of Thumbtack’s backend platforms, starting with Go
- It operates alongside existing client infrastructure teams and follows a phased, platform-oriented model that prioritizes high-leverage improvements
- The team’s work enables backend engineers across the company to iterate faster, diagnose failures more easily, and make changes with greater confidence
- Thumbtack’s Go backend platform is one of the most critical development surfaces at the company, powering a large portion of our backend services and touched by engineers across dozens of teams
- Despite this scale and importance, backend platforms—especially Go—have not had recent dedicated infrastructure ownership
- As a result, engineers experience slow and brittle CI pipelines, limited failure visibility, and inefficient local development workflows, alongside long-term risk in shared codebases due to unclear ownership and inconsistent platform stewardship
- In contrast, Thumbtack’s client infrastructure teams supporting Frontend, iOS, and Android have shown that dedicated platform ownership leads to faster iteration, clearer failure diagnosis, and more reliable development workflows
- The challenge of this role is to apply those proven client-infrastructure ownership and operating patterns to backend platforms, establishing durable foundations for backend CI/CD, local development, and codebase health
- Improvements in this role will have outsized impact by unblocking large portions of backend engineering and enabling the platform to scale confidently over time, starting with Go
- Own the end-to-end health of Go build and verification pipelines, including performance, reliability, and flakiness reduction
- Define and implement consistent, high-signal backend CI/CD failure visibility and debugging workflows
- Improve local backend development and iteration workflows to shorten feedback loops and reduce reliance on staging deploys
- Establish and enforce Go platform standards, ownership boundaries, and baseline documentation expectations to improve long-term codebase health
- Proactively improve shared Go codebases to reduce regression risk and increase confidence when making changes
- Partner with Platform Engineering and other infrastructure teams to align backend infrastructure with existing platform foundations
- Act as a steward for the backend engineering community by running forums, collecting feedback, sharing progress, mentoring engineers, and reviewing code in shared areas
Our take
ThumbTack is a local services marketplace app that pairs customers with skilled professionals. Instead of simply searching for a professional, users provide ThumbTack with details of the job they need completing and the professionals then pitch their services to the potential customer using credits. ThumbTack makes its money by charging the professional for these credits.
It positions itself as something a little different in a saturated local services space that is dominated by companies like Angie’s List, TaskRabbit, Yelp, eBay, and Amazon. It also focuses on a broad range of professionals, from traditional home services like electricians and painters to photographers, personal trainers, and birthday party magicians.
The COVID-19 pandemic saw a boost in business for ThumbTack as more people stayed at home and made changes to their properties, increasing the demand for home professionals. In fact, after 2019, the company doubled in value to $3.2 billion with its 2021 raise. Since its 2024 funding round, its updated app has 30 new features, and the company is partnering with the likes of trade-powering platform and Unicorn ServiceTitan, indicating Thumbtack's sustained sway in the market.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-5% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
Jun 2021
$275m
LATE VC
Jul 2019
$150m
SERIES F
Total funding: $699.4m
Company benefits
- Parental leave
- Health insurance
- Community matters | Sure, our ways of connecting have changed. But we haven’t missed a beat, from virtual concerts to “TTversary” celebrations to weekly catch-ups
- Always be improving | We bring out the best in our colleagues — and our product — by pushing each beyond what we believe we’re capable of. We give honest feedback, even when it’s hard
- Wellness is a way of life | We promote balance with generous PTO and company-wide holidays — and find our centers every Wellness Wednesday with yoga featuring a Thumbtack pro
- A worthy mission | In a world where tech is often seen as eroding good jobs, we’re helping small business owners thrive. Our product makes entrepreneurship accessible to everyone
- Driven by our values | Our values are the compass by which we make all our decisions. Each one matters: Lead with why, Make it count, Own it, Choose teamwork, and Say what you mean
- Plus, amazing benefits | All the benefits you’d expect, plus a few more: generous parental and fertility benefits, $1800 for Thumbtack services per year and a $1200 remote work stipend
- Virtual-first working model coupled with quarterly in-person events and Camp Thumbtack
- 20+ company-wide holidays including two week-long shutdowns
- Libraries (collaborative workspaces) in San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Toronto, and Manila
- Cell phone and WiFi reimbursements
- Subscriptions and Employee Assistance Program for mental health and well-being
Company HQ
SoMa, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Marco Zappacosta
(Co-Founder & CEO)Having studied at Columbia University, Marco co-founded Thumbtack in August 2008. He has served as CEO since January 2009.
Jonathan Swanson
(Co-Founder & Chairman)Jonathan started his career creating financial market reports for the White House before co-founding Thumbtack in 2008. Currently Founder at Powerset and Athena.
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