Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience
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 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 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.
“Opinions from all across the organization are valued and listened to, and it’s easy and encouraged to get involved with a project you’re passionate about."
Michelle
Senior Manager, Engineering
“Opinions from all across the organization are valued and listened to, and it’s easy and encouraged to get involved with a project you’re passionate about."
Michelle
Senior Manager, Engineering
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.
This job description is not intended to be an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, or qualifications associated with the position. Duties and responsibilities may be modified or assigned at any time based on business needs.
Thumbtack uses AI tools to support our resume screening process. However, our Recruiting team’s expertise and judgment guide hiring decisions.
Scammers sometimes pose as Thumbtack recruiters or employees. Check out our blueprint on how to spot the fakes.
Perks & Benefits
Supporting you at work and beyond
In addition to our virtual-first model, we offer:
Recharge with PTO, in addition to 20 company-wide holidays each year, including a week-long end-of-year shutdown.
$1,000 USD/$1,400 CAD annual stipend for professional development, self care, office set-up and more. We also provide cell phone and Wi-Fi reimbursements.
All parents receive up to 12 weeks of paid parental leave, and birthing parents receive 8 additional weeks, for a total of 20 weeks of 100% paid parental leave (US & CAN).
$30,000 USD/CAD lifetime max reimbursement for family planning.
12 coaching sessions and 12 therapy sessions for yourself and your dependents. We also offer one-on-one financial guidance from a financial wellness provider.
$450 USD/CAD quarterly stipend to book a pro on Thumbtack for virtual or in-person services — anything from home care services to planning a child’s birthday party and beyond.
Claude Enterprise (Claude.ai, Claude Code, Cowork, Claude Desktop, Ask Thumbtack), OpenAI Enterprise ChatGPT & Codex, Cursor, Gemini Enterprise, Granola, Coda AI, Zoom AI Companion, Linear, and more.
*Access varies based on location, team, and role.
Perks & Benefits
Supporting you at work and beyond
In addition to our virtual-first model, we offer:
30 days of PTO (pro-rated based on start date), including a week-long, end-of-year shutdown and a 15% night shift differential.
PHP 46,600.00 annual stipend to use for professional development, self care, office set-up and more. We also provide PHP 1,500/month internet allowance.
12 coaching sessions and 12 therapy sessions for yourself and your dependents. We also offer one-on-one financial guidance from a financial wellness provider.
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HMO coverage includes yourself and up to three of your dependents (two at no cost). We also cover common-law and same-sex domestic partners.
Observe.AI, Forethought, Coda AI, Zoom AI Companion, Atlassian AI, and more.
*Access varies based on location, team, and role.
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