Staff Software Engineer, Babylist
$280.2-348.8k
OTE
$233.5-290.7k
BASE
+ equity
Online universal baby registry
Be an early applicant
Online universal baby registry
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$280.2-348.8k
OTE
$233.5-290.7k
BASE
+ equity
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 shipped production systems for enough years to have earned strong opinions, and you hold them loosely
- You can pick up an ambiguous problem and start moving before anyone hands you the full picture
- You've already changed how a team builds with AI, and the new way stuck
- Most Staff engineers lean one of two ways, and both do well here
- Some point their depth at the systems everyone runs on: the platforms, the reliability and security bar, the harnesses that make AI produce good code
- Others point it at the customer: framing the problem with PMs as peers, owning a journey end to end, deciding what to build and learning whether it worked
- You don't have to be both
- You do have to be excellent at one and fluent in the other
- A few things that tend to be true of people who thrive here:
- You measure yourself by impact: a customer outcome, or a system a dozen teams come to depend on
- You're curious: you spot problems before they're filed and push your own ideas until they ship
What the job involves
- As a Staff Engineer at Babylist, you own some of our hardest domains and decide where they go
- 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 own a big piece of the product, but you won't be boxed into it. The roadmap is open
- You have a say in which bets we make, and you pick what you take on next
- A Staff Engineer here sets direction
- You own a domain: a product surface, a platform area or a capability that cuts across several teams
- You set where it's going over the next year or two, sequence the bets that get there and make the technical and product calls along the way
- You're still in the code
- We don't have architects who've stopped building
- If you stepped away, multiple teams would feel it
- Your influence shows up in the systems and the work other teams choose to build on
- You don't need direct reports to have that reach
- It comes from what you build
- In practice, you:
- Take a fuzzy business problem from the first sketch through to production, and stay on the hook for whether it actually helped customers
- Build the platform or tooling other teams adopt by choice, and own it as it scales
- Make the architecture calls that span teams and the ones that are expensive to reverse
- Set the standard for how your domain builds with AI. Decide what good looks like, build the patterns and evals that get agents there and catch the output that's confidently wrong before it ships
- Partner with product, design and data as a peer, shaping what's worth building from the start
- Coach Senior engineers through the hard calls, the ambiguous ones as much as the technical ones
- A few problems people at this level are working on right now:
- Resolving one customer across registry, shop and health, plus the friends and family buying for them, so personalization works everywhere without each team rebuilding it
- Designing the knowledge system our coding agents reliably load, and working out how much context actually helps before it starts to hurt
- Building Early Investor, our new family finance product, from scratch, on a deadline that can't move
Application process
- Three rounds, usually two to three weeks start to finish
- 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
- If your timeline is tight, tell us and we'll move faster
- A Few Things To Know:
- We record and transcribe interviews to evaluate candidates, in line with applicable privacy laws
- We expect you to use AI in your work and we welcome it in the process, but what you submit and say should reflect your own thinking
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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