[Hiring] Staff Software Engineer @Thumbtack

Role Description

As a Staff Software Engineer on the team, you will be a senior technical leader on a team whose systems sit in the critical path of every AI-powered experience at Thumbtack. You will set technical direction across both of the team's surfaces:

• AI/ML platform (LLM gateway, model training and serving, feature and data workflows, orchestration, observability)
• AI evaluation platform (trace ingestion, scorer infrastructure, LLM-as-judge calibration, pre-deploy regression gates, and self-serve evaluation tooling for product teams)

This is not a role where architecture happens on a whiteboard and someone else builds it. You will design, write, and ship significant systems yourself while raising the technical bar of the engineers around you. You will partner with applied scientists, product engineering teams, and engineering leadership to define multi-quarter roadmaps, make consequential build/buy/adopt decisions across a fast-moving vendor and open-source landscape, and ensure the platform scales with the company's rapidly growing AI ambitions.

What you’ll do:

• Build and evolve core AI platform capabilities that enable teams to develop, run, and scale GenAI-powered applications across Thumbtack.
• Contribute to the design, development, and deployment of scalable tools and infrastructure to support the efforts of our applied scientists, including traditional ML model training and serving systems, feature and data workflows, CI/CD, orchestration, deployment, and evaluation tooling.
• Work hands on across the stack, from backend services and execution infrastructure to integrations with AI models and tooling.
• Partner with senior engineers to evaluate next-generation AI infrastructure frameworks and tools that help product teams harness advances in AI.
• Drive projects to completion with a strong focus on business impact and measurable outcomes.
• Solve complex technical problems and stay up to date with advances in this rapidly evolving space.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of technical leadership at staff level or equivalent scope.
• 3+ years building AI/ML infrastructure in production including model serving, feature platforms, training or orchestration systems, or ML observability.
• Hands-on experience with LLM-powered systems in production, including at least some of the following: LLM gateways or proxies, prompt and model lifecycle management, RAG or agentic architectures, and cost optimization for LLM workloads.
• Experience building or operating AI evaluation systems: offline eval pipelines, LLM-as-judge approaches and their calibration against human judgment, regression testing for model or prompt changes, or A/B measurement of AI features.
• Deep experience designing, building, and operating reliable distributed systems, including ownership of production services at meaningful scale, on-call responsibility, and incident leadership.
• Demonstrated ability to use AI coding tools in day-to-day workflows and to validate, critique, and refine AI-generated output.

Requirements

• Expected salary ranges for candidates living in all other US locations: $212,500.00 - $275,000.00.
• 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 and is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.
• We 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 law.
• We 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.