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Senior Site Reliability Engineer 🔥


Have you ever tried to hire a plumber? How about a house cleaner? If you have, chances are it took you way longer than it should. In the era of instant-everything, you shouldn’t have to waste an entire afternoon researching, calling and vetting local service professionals whenever you need one. The market for hiring them is huge — $1 trillion in the US alone — but the process is inefficient and largely offline.

Thumbtack is transforming this experience end-to-end, building a marketplace that matches millions of people with local pros for almost any project. In making these connections, not only do our customers get more done every day, our pros are able to grow their businesses and make a living doing what they’re great at.

These customers and pros come from all walks of life and every zip code in the country. We want our team to reflect that. If you come from an underrepresented background in tech, we strongly encourage you to apply. We challenge ourselves every day to make this a place where you can thrive just the way you are, so we can build a product that does the same for our customers and pros.

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 [1].

About the Role

Our Site Reliability Engineers are a hybrid of software and systems engineers. Our current mission is to design Thumbtack’s next version of the core infrastructure. We code our way out of operational problems. We are responsible for reliability, scalability, and automation while keeping an eye on latency, performance, and capacity.  

Responsibilities

  • Design, write, and maintain software to improve the availability, scalability, and efficiency of Thumbtack's services, incorporating third-­party open-source tools when available
  • Set the architectural direction of infrastructure and platform teams and supporting the entire organization
  • Design and implement the tools and processes used for deployment and Change Management and Incident Response
  • Own, maintain, and continuously improve all systems provided as a service, such as monitoring and datastores
  • Engage in service capacity planning and demand forecasting, anticipating performance bottlenecks

Must-Have Qualifications

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone excited to join the team.

  • Minimum of 9 years of industry experience in engineering
  • Fluent in one or more of: C, Python, Go, Scala
  • Familiarity with algorithms, data structures, and complexity analysis
  • In-depth knowledge of operating systems (processes, threads, IPC, concurrency, locks, mutexes, semaphores, etc.)
  • Experience working with Unix/Linux systems from kernel to shell and beyond, with experience working with system libraries, file systems, and client-server protocols
  • Experience with one or more of: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, et al.
  • Strong sense of ownership, drive, and leadership

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

  • Expertise in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems
  • Experience architecting cloud-native applications with Amazon Web Services
  • Experience with PostgreSQL tuning and performance
  • Experience managing a Container Orchestration System, such as ECS, Kubernetes
  • Experience with one or more of: Kafka, ElasticSearch, Envoy Proxy

More About Us

Thumbtack is a local services marketplace – one of the largest in the U.S. – that helps millions of people hire local professionals. With hundreds of unique service categories, customers can find a Thumbtack pro for almost anything: landscapers, DJs, personal trainers, even piano teachers. And in making these connections, we empower local pros too. Helping them get new customers and make a living doing what they’re great at.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, Thumbtack is backed by over $400 million in investment from Sequoia Capital, CapitalG, Tiger Global Management, Javelin Investment Partners and Baillie Gifford. 

  • See what it’s like to work here [2]  
  • Meet the pros who inspire us [3]
  • Engineers on a mission [4] 
  • Follow us on LinkedIn [5] 

Thumbtack is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace committed to building a team culture that celebrates diversity, equity and inclusion.


  1. https://www.thumbtack.com/engineering/
  2. https://www.thumbtack.com/careers/
  3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khIN2FCdfnM&list=PLPz1npTzydS577c1B-vduYBWoF0cRPKMv
  4. https://thumbtack.com/engineering/
  5. https://www.linkedin.com/company/thumbtack-inc.

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