Senior Software Engineer, Backend Infrastructure

Thumbtack helps millions of people confidently care for their homes.

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.

About the Engineering team

At Thumbtack, engineers at every level build products and systems that directly impact our customers and professionals. Our challenges span a wide variety of areas, ranging from building search and booking experiences, to optimizing pricing systems, to building tools to help professionals grow their businesses. We believe in tackling these hard problems together as a team, with strong values around collaboration, ownership and transparency. To read more about the hard problems that our team is taking on, visit our engineering blog.

About the role

This backend engineer role’s mission is to build and maintain the core libraries, APIs, frameworks, and backend services that power Thumbtack’s applications. As a Senior Software Engineer in this role, you will design and deliver reliable, scalable, and performant systems that serve as the backbone for Thumbtack engineers building customer-facing features. You’ll work across critical services such as user identity, image hosting, messaging and notifications, and other platform capabilities that embed directly into the Thumbtack product experience.

This is a high-impact role that combines backend infrastructure and application engineering. You’ll collaborate across teams to ensure our systems are efficient, observable, and resilient while accelerating developer productivity across the company.

Challenge

This team sits at the intersection of platform and product engineering. The challenge is twofold:

Scale & Reliability: Our services must handle high traffic and core application logic while meeting strict uptime and latency expectations.
Enablement: We must also empower other product teams with reusable libraries, frameworks, and patterns that accelerate their development while maintaining consistency and sustainability across Thumbtack’s Go-based ecosystem.

You’ll be tasked with evolving core services that underpin Thumbtack’s growth while enabling engineers company-wide to move faster with confidence.

What you'll do 

• Design, build, and maintain resilient backend services that provide core application capabilities (e.g., identity, media, delivery/communication).
• Develop and maintain reusable libraries and frameworks for logging, monitoring, storage access, and service-to-service communication.
• Partner with product and platform teams to design APIs and distributed systems patterns that are reliable, efficient, and easy to integrate.
• Anticipate scaling challenges through capacity planning and proactive engineering.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation, ensuring services meet defined SLAs and addressing production issues.

In order to be successful, you must bring

• 5+ years of experience in backend or systems engineering roles, with exposure to high-scale production environments.
• Proficiency in a backend language such as but not limited to Go, Python, or PHP to build highly available APIs and distributed systems.
• Strong knowledge of AWS and Linux.
• Experience designing, operating, and troubleshooting services that handle critical user-facing traffic.
• Solid understanding of databases, caching, and messaging systems (e.g., DynamoDB, Postgres, Redis, Kafka, or equivalents).
• Proven ability to collaborate across teams, balancing product velocity with long-term service health.
• Experience working on platforms that create leveraged software for the entire engineering organization to use and build on top of.

Expected salary ranges

• For candidates living in San Francisco / Bay Area, San Jose, New York City, or Seattle metros, the expected salary range for the role is currently $200,900 - $259,900. 
• For candidates living in Austin, TX or Washington DC metros or in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, or Washington states, the expected salary range for the role is currently $180,800 - $234,000. 
• For candidates living in all other US locations, the expected salary range for this role is currently $170,800 - $221,000.

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.

#LI-Remote

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. 

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: recruitingops@thumbtack.com. 

If you are a California resident, please review information regarding your rights under California privacy laws contained in Thumbtack’s Privacy policy available at https://www.thumbtack.com/privacy/.

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. Check out our blueprint on how to spot the fakes.