Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML Infrastructure at Thumbtack — Remote, USA | Base Career

Full Job Posting

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 which 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 Machine Learning Infrastructure Team

At Thumbtack, our challenges span a wide range of areas, including search, recommendations, matchmaking, pricing, safety, content generation, fraud detection, and more.

The ML Infrastructure team is responsible for centralizing, standardizing and evolving AI/ML infrastructure that enables these experiences.

We empower product engineering teams by providing scalable, high-performance systems that drive AI innovation at scale.

To read more about some of the engineering challenges at Thumbtack, visit our engineering blog.

The challenge

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: the AI/ML platform (LLM gateway, model training and serving, feature and data workflows, orchestration, observability) and the 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.

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.

Expected salary ranges

For candidates living in San Francisco / Bay Area, San Jose, New York City, or Seattle metros, the expected total cash compensation (base salary + variable pay, if applicable) range for the role is currently $249,900.00 - $323,400.00.

For candidates living in Austin, TX or Washington DC metros or in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, or Washington states, the expected total cash compensation (base salary + variable pay, if applicable) range for the role is currently $225,300.00 - $291,500.00.

For candidates living in all other US locations, the expected total cash compensation (base salary + variable pay, if applicable) range for the role is currently $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.

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. We also 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.

If you would like to request a reasonable accommodation for a medical condition or disability during any part of the application process, please contact: recruitingops@thumbtack.com.

For information about how Thumbtack collects, uses, and shares personal information about job applicants, please see our Job Applicant Privacy Policy.

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.

Check out our blueprint on how to spot the fakes.

Staff Software Engineer, AI/ML Infrastructure

Job Fit Check

Full Job Posting

About The Machine Learning Infrastructure Team

Apply for this job in 1 click

More jobs at Thumbtack

Product Manager, Pro Fulfillment

Product Manager, Growth

Product Designer, Partnerships and Brand Experience