Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

<h2><strong>Thumbtack helps millions of people confidently care for their homes.</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">Thumbtack is the one app you need to take care of and improve your home — from personalized guidance to AI tools and a best-in-class hiring experience. Every day in every county of the U.S., people turn to Thumbtack to complete urgent repairs, seasonal maintenance and bigger improvements. We help homeowners know which projects to do, when to do them and who to hire from our growing community of 300,000 local service businesses. If making an impact inspires you, join us. Imagine what we’ll build together.</p><h2><strong>About the Developer Experience Team</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">The Developer Experience (DX) team at Thumbtack is focused on making engineering fast, reliable, and delightful. We tackle hard problems collaboratively, grounded in strong values of ownership and transparency. As a DX team member, you’ll partner closely with engineers company-wide to identify pain points, design pragmatic solutions, and drive impactful improvements that elevate our entire engineering organization.</p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"> </div><h2><strong>The challenge</strong></h2><p style="min-height:1.5em">We’re tackling some of the most important and complex challenges in modern software development. We’re introducing GenAI tooling into a hybrid local/cloud development environment — balancing innovation with reliability and performance. We’re streamlining the designer–developer feedback loop to enable rapid prototyping and faster iteration. And we’re building the foundations for measuring developer productivity across diverse workflows, helping Thumbtack make smarter, faster engineering investments.</p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"> </div><h2><strong>What you’ll do</strong></h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Own the realization of the company’s charter across key infrastructure components – build systems, CI/CD, test infra, observability and dev/test environments.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Optimize performance, improve usability and simplify configuration of developer workflows throughout the development pipeline to production.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Explore best-in-class and cutting-edge technologies in the industry, evaluate relevance to Thumbtack, and drive adoption of impactful technologies at the company.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"> </div></li></ul><h2><strong>In order to be successful, you must bring</strong></h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">Minimum of 4+ years of industry experience in software engineering.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You’re fluent in at least one major programming language and would be able to switch between multiple languages and frameworks. In our stack, we use Go, Scala, PHP, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Swift, and Kotlin for our web and mobile apps. Our developer tooling is in Go and Python.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You know what it means to write high quality, maintainable, testable, reliable and performant code, and you enjoy doing it.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You can break down complex problems rigorously and understand the tradeoffs necessary to deliver great, impactful products.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">You care deeply about developer infrastructure, and have consistently made improvements to the developer ecosystem around you throughout your career.</p></li><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p></li></ul><div style="min-height:1.2em;margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0"> </div><h2><strong>Expected salary ranges</strong></h2><ul style="min-height:1.5em"><li><p style="min-height:1.5em">For candidates living in Ontario and British Columbia, the expected salary range for the role is currently $180,200.00 - $233,200.00.</p></li></ul><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Note: Thumbtack uses AI tools to support our resume screening process. However, our Recruiting team’s expertise and judgment guide hiring decisions.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">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.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Thumbtack embraces diversity. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and do not discriminate on the basis of sex, race, color, age, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, marital status, military or veteran status, genetic information, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, provincial, state, or local law. We also will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records, consistent with applicable law.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">Thumbtack is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If you would like to request a reasonable accommodation for a medical condition or disability during any part of the application process, please contact: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="mailto:recruitingops@thumbtack.com"><u>recruitingops@thumbtack.com</u></a>.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">If you are a California resident, please review information regarding your rights under California privacy laws contained in Thumbtack’s Privacy policy available at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.thumbtack.com/privacy/"><u>https://www.thumbtack.com/privacy/</u></a>.</p><p style="min-height:1.5em">We put as much craftsmanship into candidate safety as we do into the hiring experience itself. While scammers may try to impersonate our team, we’ll never ask you for money, banking info, or SSNs during hiring. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://careers.thumbtack.com/recruiting-scams"><u>Check out our blueprint on how to spot the fakes.</u></a></p>

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Common Interview Questions And Answers

1. HOW DO YOU PLAN YOUR DAY?

This is what this question poses: When do you focus and start working seriously? What are the hours you work optimally? Are you a night owl? A morning bird? Remote teams can be made up of people working on different shifts and around the world, so you won't necessarily be stuck in the 9-5 schedule if it's not for you...

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Or you may receive even more specific questions, such as: What's on your calendar? Do you plan blocks of time to do certain types of work? Do you have an open calendar that everyone can see?...

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Just like your schedule, how you track files and other information is very important. After all, everything is digital!...

8. HOW TO PRIORITIZE WORK?

The day I watched Marie Forleo's film separating the important from the urgent, my life changed. Not all remote jobs start fast, but most of them are...

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Just as communication is essential when working remotely, so is organization. Because you won't have those opportunities in the elevator or a casual conversation in the lunchroom, you should take advantage of the little time you have in a video or phone conference...

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This is a great question because it shows your comfort level with technology, which is very important for a remote worker because you will be working with technology over time...