Staff Software Engineer - Backend Infrastructure

About the Backend Infrastructure Team

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.

The challenge

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.

What you'll do

• 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.

In order to be successful, you must bring

• 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.

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 $249,900 - $323,400.
• 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 $225,300 - $291,100.
• For candidates living in all other US locations, the expected salary range for this role is currently $212,500 - $275,000.

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.