Software Engineer, Control Plane

Hightouch’s mission is to empower everyone to take action on their data. Hundreds of companies, including Autotrader, Calendly, Cars.com, Monday.com, and PetSmart, trust Hightouch to power their growth.

We pioneered the Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP), which lets companies use their own data warehouse to collect, prepare, and activate customer data for marketing personalization and business operations. Our new AI Decisioning platform goes a step further,  allowing marketers to set goals and guardrails that AI agents can then use to personalize 1:1 customer interactions. Traditionally, only technical teams had the skills to access and use customer data. With Hightouch, every business user can deliver personalized customer experiences, optimize performance marketing, and move faster by leveraging data and AI across their organization.

Our team focuses on making a meaningful impact for our customers. We approach challenges with a first-principles mindset, move quickly and efficiently, and treat each other with compassion and kindness. We look for team members who are strong communicators, have a growth mindset, and are motivated and persistent in achieving our goals. 

What else? We’re based in San Francisco but have team members all over the world. Our Series C put us at a $1.2B valuation, and we are backed by leading investors such as Sapphire Ventures, Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Afore Capital.

In the last 12-18 months, Hightouch has been adopted by larger and larger customers and enterprises. These enterprises have both high data scale as well as complex organizations with many individuals and teams using Hightouch on a daily basis. The Control Plane team focuses on building user-friendly but powerful tools and products for enterprises to efficiently onboard onto Hightouch and manage and scale their Hightouch deployments.

We’re looking to add a product-minded backend engineer to the team. The ideal candidate will be comfortable diving deep into backend, distributed systems, and asynchronous workflows and think holistically about architecture, scalability, maintainability, and reliability. We are also looking for someone with strong customer and product thinking and who feels comfortable writing and engaging with product specs.

Some of the problems we’ll be working on include:

• Roles, Permissions, and Access Control: We have a flexible and powerful access control framework that allows enterprise admins to configure the right level of permissions for different groups of users and teams within their company. As Hightouch expands our product lines, the Control Plane team will also adapt and extend our access control capabilities to support that growth.
• Change Management: When a customer’s underlying data model or data warehouse changes, this can have downstream impact on their Customer Studio schema, audiences, and other syncs and data pipelines. What tools can we build for admins to better manage these types of changes at scale?
• Data Warehouse Performance and Costs: As customers continue to adopt Hightouch within their organizations and their usage of Hightouch grows, they’ll drive more warehouse activity and compute from Hightouch. How can we help admins better understand and optimize warehouse performance and costs as a result of Hightouch activity?

We are looking for talented, intellectually curious, and motivated individuals who are interested in tackling the problems above. This is a senior role, but we focus on impact and potential for growth more than years of experience. The salary range for this position is $180,000 - $260,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. We also offer meaningful equity compensation in the form of ISO options, and offer early exercise and a 10 year post-termination exercise window.

Our interview process focuses on evaluating fit for the most important dimensions of the role: product sense, ability to architect backend and distributed systems, and alignment with Hightouch’s values. Notably, we don’t do any programming interviews as we believe they are low signal to noise and aren’t a good evaluation mechanism.

• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Introductory call with our recruiting team to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• System Design Screen [60m]: Designing a data processing feature end-to-end.
• Hiring Manager Interview [30m]: Chat with hiring manager about past experiences and future operating preferences to assess fit on company values and operating principles.
• System Design Interview [90m]: Work with the interviewer to architect a system at a conceptual level. The problem will be at a pretty high level - and have both product and customer requirements as well as technical.