Staff Data Engineer, Marketing Technology

About Thumbtack

Thumbtack helps millions of people confidently care for their homes. It 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 Marketing Tech Team

The Marketing Tech team is critical at Thumbtack, overseeing and optimizing millions in marketing spend and directly driving the company’s top-line revenue growth. As part of this team, you’d work on a wide range of marketing lanes such as paid (SEM, Social, Streaming Media, etc.) as well as organic (SEO, Engagement, and Lifecycle Marketing, etc.), having an outsized impact on our broader marketing efforts.

The Challenge

Thumbtack is relatively early in building a world-class Marketing Tech stack. This Staff Data Engineer, Marketing Technology role reports to the Embedded Data Engineering team but works day-to-day with the Marketing Tech engineering team, within a small sub-team of two other Data Engineers. You’ll collaborate to develop and build the vision for incorporating data through all aspects of marketing at Thumbtack, designed with our cross-functional team. Thumbtack fosters a very collaborative culture of builders, and as such, you’d help set the data architecture, be hands-on in building our datasets, and mentor engineers as we go.

What You'll Do as a Staff Data Engineer, Marketing Technology

• Collaboratively refine and evangelize a comprehensive framework for integrating data-thinking into the software development lifecycle for marketing.
• Design, architect, and maintain core marketing datasets, data marts, and feature stores that support a blend of mature products and features with a rapidly evolving product line, in partnership with analytics, data science, and machine learning.
• Integrate with teams consisting of product engineers, analysts, data scientists, and machine learning engineers throughout marketing to understand their data needs, and help design datasets with the same engineering rigor as any other software we design.
• Drive data quality and best practices across marketing and business areas.
• Help build the next generation of marketing data products at Thumbtack, based on real-time data products on top of Apache Kafka.

What You'll Bring

• 8+ years of experience designing, building, and scaling data systems—spanning pipelines, warehouses, and analytical data products that drive measurable business impact.
• Proven technical leadership in architecting and evolving complex data ecosystems, including ownership of data models, transformation frameworks, and integrations across multiple data domains; advanced proficiency in SQL and Python.
• Deep experience with modern data stacks, including cloud-native warehouses (e.g., BigQuery or Snowflake), orchestration tools (Airflow or equivalent), and transformation frameworks (dbt or similar).
• Strong system design and architecture mindset, able to reason about scalability, cost, and performance trade-offs, and define long-term data strategy.
• Exceptional collaboration and influence skills, partnering effectively with Marketing Engineering, Analytics, and Data Science to translate business goals into robust, production-grade data systems.
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability, balancing hands-on technical execution with the ability to mentor others, raise standards, and drive organization-wide improvements in data quality and reliability.

Key skills/competency

• Data Engineering
• Marketing Technology
• Data Architecture
• SQL
• Python
• BigQuery
• Snowflake
• Airflow
• dbt
• Apache Kafka