Engineering Manager, Marketplace

At Thumbtack, the Marketplace team is responsible for building a world-class, two-sided marketplace where customers have delightful hiring experiences. We are also responsible for building a healthy ecosystem that maximizes marketplace value for customers and pros on our platform.

This includes enhancing the end-to-end search & hiring experience that enables millions of U.S. customers to find and hire professionals from a marketplace of more than 300,000 local businesses. The marketplace team is organized into a set of smaller cross-functional product teams (pods) that own certain key problems and their underlying infrastructure. Each pod is typically composed of an engineering manager, a product manager, around 6-12 software engineers and cross functional partners like designers, applied scientists, data scientists etc. Each pod typically runs 20-30 experiments (A/B tests) per year, typically aimed at driving business metrics related to conversion or monetization.

The primary challenge for an Engineering Manager (EM) within the marketplace is to help homeowners across the U.S. search for and hire the most relevant home service professionals—and ultimately get their jobs done. We address this by tackling complex problems at the intersection of engineering, data science, and applied science. 

We help homeowners start more projects on Thumbtack by enabling them to express their needs in everyday, conversational language through our search bar. This involves solving underlying challenges around query comprehension and problem scoping. As customers define their project, we help them share their preferences and availability to better match them with the most relevant professionals. We then support them in comparing and selecting the right pros for their job.

In addition, we enable customers to explore the breadth of services available on Thumbtack—helping them browse and discover offerings, and recommending services or professionals based on their past interactions. Beyond building new experiences, we also focus on evolving and scaling the critical infrastructure that powers the marketplace.

We are seeking an Engineering Manager for one of the cross-functional product teams (pods) within the larger marketplace team. You will partner with the Product Manager to help define technical & product strategy that include your team’s OKRs (Objectives & Key Results), and will be responsible for driving execution. You will also be responsible for coaching and managing engineers (backend, front end, iOS, Android) on a full-stack product team.

Given that the marketplace team drives a sizable portion of Thumbtack’s revenue growth, this is a high impact, high visibility role within the company. To be successful in this role, you will need to effectively collaborate with cross functional counterparts (product, design, applied science, data science etc.) across the company.​​

• Define and evolve the technical vision & strategy for your team.
• Effectively collaborate with cross functional counterparts (product design, applied science, data science) on strategy & execution.
• Drive team execution against team-specific OKRs.
• Lead and manage the team as a highly-competent technical leader (not just a people leader), who can help guide complex technical decisions.
• Hire, coach and manage full-stack engineers at all levels including Staff+ eng.
• Build and evolve a high performing culture of excellence on the team.
• Be accountable for maintaining and scaling the infrastructure owned by your team.
• Work closely with other engineering leaders to evolve and continually improve Thumbtack’s engineering culture in a high paced growth environment.

• 2+ years of experience in an engineering management role.
• 5+ years of experience building software at scale.
• Strong technical skills and is willing to be hands-on with code reviews, debugging, and systems design. 
• Strong leadership, collaboration and communication skills.
• Experience shaping technical & product strategy in collaboration with cross functional counterparts (design, product, data science).
• Experience with decision making using A/B testing. 
• Commitment to building inclusive teams and team culture.

#LI-Remote