Staff Data Engineer, Marketing Technology

About the Marketing Tech Team

Marketing Tech is a critical team at Thumbtack overseeing and optimizing millions of marketing spend and is directly responsible for driving our company’s top line revenue growth. As part of this team, you’d get to 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) and have an outsized impact on our broader marketing efforts.

The Challenge

Thumbtack is relatively early in the journey of building out a world-class Marketing Tech stack. This role reports to the Embedded Data Engineering team, but works day-to-day with the Marketing Tech engineering team, with a small sub-team of two other Data Engineers. You’ll work collaboratively to develop and build the vision of 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

• 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, 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

In order to be successful, you must 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.

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 $249,900 - $323,400.
• 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 $224,900 - $291,100.
• For candidates living in all other US locations, the expected salary range for this role is currently $212,400 - $274,900.

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.

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