[Hiring] Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience @Thumbtack

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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 $210,800.00 - $272,800.00.
• 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 $189,600.00 - $245,300.00.
• For candidates living in all other US locations, the expected salary range for this role is currently $179,400.00 - $232,100.00.
• 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.

Benefits

• 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.
• 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: [email protected].
• 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.