Staff Back-End Engineer, Commerce

About the role

This role operates on a hybrid schedule requiring two days of in-office collaboration per week in our San Francisco office.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect: Define the multi-quarter technical roadmap for Commerce domains (payments, payouts, billing) along with the engineering manager and architects - driving strategy, addressing tech debt, and evolving scalable system architecture, APIs, and data models for financial correctness.
• Tech Lead: Lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives involving Taskrabbit, Stripe, and Sovos. Collaborate across engineering, finance, and product to align on architecture and manage dependencies.
• Solver: Translate ambiguous, high-stakes business goals into clear technical strategies, designs, and experiments.
• Operational Excellence: Elevate reliability and observability (Datadog, Kafka) for money-flow systems. Own complex production debugging and drive systemic fixes. Improve incident response and automate reconciliation workflows.
• Multiplier: Serve as a Ruby on Rails subject-matter expert, champion high-quality testing (RSpec) for financial systems, mentor engineers, and produce durable technical documentation.
• Champion Spec-Driven Development (SDD): Lead the adoption of Spec-Driven Development (SDD) with AI tools, ensuring engineers consistently turn well-defined specs into robust Ruby on Rails implementations and comprehensive RSpec unit and integration tests.

Requirements

• 7+ years professional backend engineering, with demonstrated Staff-level impact (leading complex domains, influencing multiple teams).
• Deep expertise in building and evolving large Ruby on Rails applications.
• Strong SQL and data modeling for financial use cases (Postgres, Snowflake).
• Hands-on experience with async/event-driven systems (Kafka) handling financial data(idempotency, ordering).
• Proven track record designing and owning observability/alerting for critical systems.
• Mastery in production debugging, modernization, and RSpec testing for financial correctness.
• Excellent communication, ability to influence without authority, and a strong ownership mentality for systems handling money and trust.

Bonus Points if you have

• Experience in fintech, billing, or e-commerce domains.
• Hands-on AI tools experience with Claude, Augment CLI et al
• Hands-on work integrating with Stripe, tax engines (e.g., Sovos), or similar providers.
• Experience with accounting and financial reconciliation flows, audits, or compliance-sensitive systems.
• Familiarity with microservice and event-driven architectures at scale.

Compensation & Benefits

At Taskrabbit, our approach to compensation is designed to be competitive, transparent, and equitable. Total compensation consists of base pay + bonus + benefits + perks.

The base pay range for this position is $150,000 - $200,000. This range is representative of base pay only, and does not include any other total cash compensation amounts, such as company bonus or benefits. Final offer amounts may vary from the amounts listed above and will be determined by factors including, but not limited to, relevant experience, qualifications, geography, and level.