Senior Software Engineer, Developer Experience

About the Developer Experience Team

The Developer Experience (DevEx) team makes Thumbtack's ~250 engineers more productive. We own the AI-powered developer workflows, cloud development environments, and internal developer platform the whole engineering org builds on. We're small and senior: a four-person team in Productivity Engineering, alongside Mobile Infra, Frontend Infrastructure, and Design Systems Engineering. We partner closely with engineers across the company to find their pain points and ship solutions. You can read more about our engineering culture on the Thumbtack Engineering Blog.

The challenge

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.

   

• 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.

Expected salary ranges

• 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.