Thumbtack, Inc.

Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

Thumbtack, Inc. • $180K — $233K *
US-Anywhere
+ 2 other locationsRemote
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Minimum of 4+ years in software engineering experience.
  • Fluency in at least one major programming language, with flexibility to switch between languages.
  • Knowledge of writing high quality, maintainable, and performant code.
  • Experience on a developer infrastructure team, or contributions to related open source projects.
  • Ability to analyze complex problems and understand tradeoffs in product development.
  • Strong passion for improving developer infrastructure throughout your career.
  • Critical thinking skills with a data-driven mindset.

Responsibilities

  • Own key infrastructure projects including build systems, CI/CD, and test infrastructure.
  • Optimize performance and usability of developer workflows from pipeline to production.
  • Collaborate with engineers across various teams to address pain points in tools and systems.
  • Evaluate and drive adoption of cutting-edge technologies relevant to Thumbtack.
  • Ensure timely completion of engineering projects with a focus on developer impact.
  • Tackle complex technical problems across the stack from front-end to infrastructure.

Benefits

  • Collaborative and innovative work environment tackling modern software challenges.
  • Opportunity to work with a diverse tech stack and cutting-edge technologies.
  • Engagement in fast-paced projects with a focus on developer productivity.
  • Possibility of contributing to impactful solutions for the developer community.
Full Job Description
The Developer Experience Team

The Developer Experience (DevEx) team makes Thumbtack's ~250 engineers more productive. We own the AI-powered developer workflows, cloud development environments, and internal developer platform the whole engineering org builds on. We're small and senior: a four-person team in Productivity Engineering, alongside Mobile Infra, Frontend Infrastructure, and Design Systems Engineering. We partner closely with engineers across the company to find their pain points and ship solutions. You can read more about our engineering culture on the Thumbtack Engineering Blog.

The challenge

We're building the infrastructure for an AI-native engineering organization, and every stream here is active work today: agentic developer tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, backed by a library of skills that encode Thumbtack-specific knowledge; a catalog of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that make our internal tools AI-accessible; and cloud development environments (CDEs) built for humans and agents alike. Alongside these, we're modernizing the Web and CLI tooling layers engineers reach for every day. A single improvement we ship can move dozens of teams forward.

What you'll do
  • Build the platforms behind agentic developer workflows: roll out the tools the org builds on (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) and ship the skills, plugins, and MCP servers that run across them.
  • Design and build the product surfaces engineers and AI agents reach for daily: self-service workflows in our Backstage developer portal, our developer CLI, IDE integrations, and the framework engineers use to build and deploy their own agents.
  • Own and evolve our Cloud Development Environment (CDE) platform for both human developers and AI agents.
  • Improve the build systems, CI/CD pipelines, test infrastructure, and observability the whole org depends on.
  • Prototype and evaluate new AI developer tools as they land, and decide what to adopt, configure, and scale across the engineering org.
In order to be successful, you must bring
  • Demonstrated experience building developer infrastructure, DevEx, or platform tools that other engineers depend on, from CDE rollouts and internal CLIs to MCP servers and build/CI at 100+ engineer scale.
  • Strong systems thinking: you reason about build pipelines, CI/CD, dev environments, and test infrastructure as interconnected systems, not isolated tools.
  • A UX mindset applied to engineering systems: you think in personas, journeys, and end-to-end workflows, and design for the people and agents who use what you build.
  • Hands-on experience with agentic developer tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex, and considered opinions about their limits, where they help, and how to scale their use.
  • Fluency in the languages our tooling is built in: Go and Python for CLIs, services, MCP servers, and Slackbots, plus TypeScript and React for the web UIs.
  • 6+ years of industry experience in software engineering, including cross-team projects with measurable impact on engineering productivity.


Expected salary ranges
  • For candidates living in Ontario and British Columbia, the expected salary range for the role is currently $180,200.00 - $233,200.00.

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.

Note: Thumbtack uses AI tools to support our resume screening process. However, our Recruiting team's expertise and judgment guide hiring decisions.

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.

About Thumbtack, Inc.

Thumbtack is an online marketplace that connects consumers with local professionals for various services, such as home improvement, events, and wellness. The company was founded in 2008 by Marco Zappacosta, Jonathan Swanson, and Sander Daniels, and has since grown to serve millions of customers across the United States. Thumbtack uses a proprietary matching algorithm to connect customers with the best professionals for their needs, and offers a range of tools to help professionals manage their businesses. The company has raised over $400 million in funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital, Google Capital, and Tiger Global Management.
Learn more about Thumbtack, Inc.
Size
1,200 employees
Industry
Founded
2008

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