Senior Full Stack Engineer, People Products

About the Business Applications Team

The Business Applications org builds and operates the internal systems that keep Thumbtack running at scale: Salesforce-centered workflows, admin tooling, and the integrations that connect teams across the company. We're now expanding that foundation into a broader internal platform for AI-enabled work — shared APIs, reusable integration patterns, and safe, auditable capabilities for business-critical actions. We work directly with the business teams who depend on these systems, turning complex operational needs into software that's easier to run, extend, and automate responsibly.

The challenge

Thumbtack’s People team is reimagining how employees and leaders experience People programs—and how the People team operates. Employees get support tailored to their circumstances, managers bring relevant evidence into feedback and team decisions, and People specialists spend less time coordinating processes across systems. We have promising starting points: a People Q&A assistant, personalized insights that help leaders understand their teams, and automations across HR and recruiting systems. You’ll help build what comes next: advisors that bring People expertise and personal context together, experiences that anticipate needs and help people act on insights, and connected workflows that complete work on someone’s behalf.

Making this possible means working with some of the company’s most sensitive information—performance, feedback, org structure, and hiring. Every product must know who the user is, what they’re allowed to see and do, what an AI model may receive, and what gets retained. You’ll own that engineering problem end to end, building on our identity-aware infrastructure as it matures and extending its capabilities to meet the specific needs of People products. You’ll work day to day with People Products & Data, who set product direction and priorities, alongside TPMs, HR systems analysts, data scientists, data engineers, and other partners—while building on and contributing to the Business Applications platform.

What you’ll do

• Take early People products to production and grow them into a suite of experiences, across standalone products, plugins, and everyday tools, that move from answers and insights to personalized guidance, proactive support, and approved actions.

• Redesign workflows across Workday, Ashby, and other systems, from approved headcount to open requisition and accepted offer to onboarding.

• Build APIs and connectors, including MCP connectors, that let AI tools safely access relevant context and complete workflows on users’ behalf.

• Design the permissioning model for confidential People data: identity, person-level authorization, what reaches the model, retention, approvals, and audit.

• Partner with People Products & Data on instrumentation and AI evaluations to measure quality, enforce boundaries, and improve products.

• Create the reusable building blocks that let People team members safely build simpler tools themselves, so your time goes to the most complex, highest-impact work.

• Own what you ship across the stack, from React and TypeScript through service code and data models, and set technical direction with non-engineering partners by shaping ambiguous problems, pushing back on scope, and proposing simpler paths.

• [5+] years of professional software engineering experience, including owning systems end to end from ambiguous problem to production.

• Strong full-stack skills: React and TypeScript on the frontend, and solid backend engineering. We use Go, PHP, and Python, and we expect strong engineers to pick up a new language.

• Working knowledge of relational and non-relational data stores (Postgres, DynamoDB, or similar).

• Sound judgment with sensitive data: authentication and authorization, least-privilege access, auditability, and privacy-aware design.

• Experience building internal tools or business systems — people, sales, marketing, finance, or operations tooling — and integrating with SaaS platforms through their APIs.

• Real product judgment: you can look at a workflow, decide what to build, and say what to cut.

• Comfort operating with a high degree of autonomy as the primary engineer on a product area, and a track record of raising the technical bar for the people around you.

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 $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 total cash compensation (base salary + variable pay, if applicable) range for the role is currently $189,600.00 - $245,300.00.

• For candidates living in all other US locations, the expected total cash compensation (base salary + variable pay, if applicable) range for this role is currently $179,400.00 - $232,100.00.