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Senior Software Engineer, Site Reliability Engineering

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Remote from
USA
Salary
USD 179,400–272,800 / yr
Employment
Full Time
Experience
Senior
Published
Apply before
23 Nov 2026
Listing views
51
Application actions
3
Application toolkit

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AI Summary

The role, at a glance.

Thumbtack is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Site Reliability Engineering team to improve the availability, scalability, security, and efficiency of platform services. The role combines infrastructure architecture, software development, operational tooling, capacity planning, and production troubleshooting across a large distributed environment. The engineer will partner with product, developer-experience, backend-infrastructure, and applied-science teams while contributing to platform strategy. Core requirements include deep AWS and Linux expertise, strong coding ability, distributed-systems knowledge, observability experience, and participation in an on-call rotation. This is a remote, full-time US role with geographically tiered expected salary ranges.

Role DNA

A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.

Job Complexity

5/5
EasyHard

Pace & Pressure

4/5
RelaxedFast-paced

Autonomy Level

4/5
GuidedFull ownership

Communication Load

4/5
IndependentCollaborative
AI insightThis is a senior, high-leverage SRE role supporting critical distributed production systems, with architectural ownership and on-call responsibilities. It requires broad technical depth across cloud infrastructure, networking, software engineering, observability, and reliability tradeoffs.

Salary analysis

Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.

Estimated job median (per year)Market rate
$226,100
US market range (per year)$180k–$275k
AI insightThe yearly pay period is inferred from the job context; it was not explicitly stated by the employer. The employer discloses geographically tiered expected salary ranges of $179,400–$272,800 USD. The yearly period is inferred from the compensation magnitude and senior full-time US engineering context, rather than explicitly stated. A reasonable estimated US market range for a senior SRE in this context is $180,000–$275,000 USD per year.

Core skills

Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.

Sample interview questions
How would you approach improving reliability for a service with recurring latency spikes?

I would first establish a baseline through service-level indicators, tracing, logs, infrastructure metrics, and dependency analysis. I would isolate whether the bottleneck is caused by application code, database behavior, network latency, resource saturation, or downstream services, then prioritize mitigations based on user impact and risk. I would implement durable fixes with alerting, load testing, capacity plans, and an appropriate error-budget or SLO review.

Describe how you would design an effective observability strategy for a microservices platform.

I would define service-level objectives tied to customer-facing outcomes and instrument the four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. I would standardize structured logs, metrics, distributed tracing, dashboards, and correlation identifiers across services. The result should help engineers quickly connect an alert to the affected user path, dependency, deployment, and infrastructure condition.

What factors do you consider when planning capacity for a cloud-based distributed system?

I review historical demand, seasonality, growth forecasts, workload characteristics, service limits, redundancy requirements, and failure scenarios. I validate assumptions through load and stress testing, account for headroom during incidents or regional impairment, and automate scaling where appropriate. Capacity decisions should be continuously revisited using production utilization and performance data.

How do you reduce operational toil while maintaining safe infrastructure changes?

I identify repetitive, manual, error-prone activities and prioritize automation based on frequency, operational risk, and engineering time saved. I use infrastructure as code, versioned deployment pipelines, automated validation, progressive delivery, and clear rollback mechanisms. I also measure whether the automation improves lead time, change-failure rate, and on-call burden.

How would you communicate a critical production incident to both engineers and nontechnical stakeholders?

I would provide concise, factual updates covering impact, scope, current mitigation, ownership, and the next update time. For engineers, I would include relevant technical signals, hypotheses, and coordination needs; for nontechnical stakeholders, I would focus on customer impact and restoration progress. After recovery, I would lead a blameless review with corrective actions, owners, and due dates.

This analysis is generated from the job description. Salary estimates, role characteristics and sample answers are guidance, not employer-provided facts.
Opportunity details

About this role.

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 Site Reliability Engineering Team

Thumbtack’s Site Reliability Engineering team focuses on creating and maintaining a reliable, secure, and scalable platform vital for a seamless user experience. As a key contributor, you will design and support resilient systems, prioritizing high performance, availability, and throughput, with a focus on minimizing service disruptions, downtime, and latency. SRE impacts Thumbtack’s ecosystem across the entire stack, from linux systems to applications that drive the customer experience. Our work is high leverage impacting how Engineering, Applied Science, and many other teams deliver, run, and observe systems.

The challenge

The Site Reliability team is responsible for a broad set of technologies and systems with expectations to collaborate across the business. We are expected to develop and enhance existing capabilities while ensuring scalability, reliability and resiliency of infrastructure and software. You’ll work with engineering teams ranging from product development, developer experience, and backend infrastructure to collaboratively build Thumbtack’s ecosystem of platform services that have the right impact at the right time. Thumbtack values its cross functional collaborative culture, and you’d be positioned to contribute to the future direction and success of the engineering platform that serves as the engine of our applications.

What you’ll do

  • Design, create, and maintain software and systems to improve the availability, scalability, and efficiency of Thumbtack’s services

  • Set the architectural direction of infrastructure and platform services while supporting the engineering organization

  • Design and implement tools and processes used for deployment, change, service, and infrastructure management

  • Troubleshoot and debug critical systems throughout the SDLC

  • Contribute to the evolution and performance of capabilities we provide to engineering as a platform organization

  • Capacity planning and demand forecasting, anticipating performance bottlenecks

  • Participate in rotating on-call duties

In order to be successful, you must bring

  • Extensive fluency in AWS and Linux

  • Ability to effectively read, write, and debug code in programming languages like but not limited to: Python, Go, PHP, Javascript

  • Expertise in designing, analyzing, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems across web technologies like: DNS, TLS, HTTP/S, TCP/IP

  • Ability to decompose complex problems while understanding the tradeoffs necessary to deliver impact

  • 5 years of experience managing infrastructure and systems

  • Demonstrable knowledge of instrumenting, operating, and observing a distributed system of microservices in a production cloud environment

  • Ability to communicate clearly and effectively to cross functional partners of various technical levels

  • Passion for reducing toil and improving developer experience

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

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

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.

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