Staff Back-End Engineer, Commerce at Taskrabbit

About Taskrabbit: Taskrabbit is a marketplace platform that conveniently connects people with Taskers to handle everyday home to-do’s, such as furniture assembly, handyman work, moving help, and much more. At Taskrabbit, we want to transform lives one task at a time. As a company we celebrate innovation, inclusion and hard work. Our culture is collaborative, pragmatic, and fast-paced. We’re looking for talented, entrepreneurially minded and data-driven people who also have a passion for helping people do what they love. Together with IKEA, we’re creating more opportunities for people to earn a consistent, meaningful income on their own terms by building lasting relationships with clients in communities around the world. Taskrabbit is a hybrid company with employees distributed across the US and EU and a Built In — Best Places to Work (2022, 2023, 2024) continually ranked across multiple national and regional categories. Join us at Taskrabbit, where your work will be meaningful, your ideas valued, and your potential unleashed! This role operates on a hybrid schedule requiring two days of in-office collaboration per week in our San Francisco office. About the Role: We're seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to join our remotely distributed Commerce team, someone who doesn't just build, but raises the quality bar across our entire ecosystem. You'll be instrumental in shaping the reliability, performance, and maintainability of our critical financial infrastructure, directly impacting how our customers and taskers experience money. Our Commerce team is at the heart of our operations, building and maintaining the billing, payment processing, payouts and taxes/fees that make money simple and accessible. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll dive deep into our systems, not only delivering new features but also acting as a critical advocate for engineering rigor and operational excellence. You'll work independently and collaboratively in our team, tackling complex challenges and leaving a lasting impact on our codebase and processes. 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. You’ll love working here because: • Taskrabbit is a Hybrid Company. We value flexibility and choice but also stay committed to regular in-person connection. • The People. You will be surrounded by some of the most talented, supportive, smart, and kind leaders and teams -- people you can be proud to work with! • The Diverse Culture. We believe that we make better decisions when our workforce reflects the diversity of the communities in which we operate. Women make up half of our leadership team and our diversity representation is above that of the tech industry average. • The Perks. Taskrabbit offers our employees with employer-paid health insurance and a 401k match with immediate vesting for our US based employees. We offer all of our global employees generous and flexible time off with 2 company-wide closure weeks, Taskrabbit product stipends, wellness + productivity + education stipends, IKEA discounts, reproductive health support, and more. Benefits vary by country of employment. Taskrabbit’s commitment to Diversity and Inclusion: An Active Commitment to Equity within our Company and Platform. We are an inclusive community where all who share our mission and values belong. Our diverse team represents the communities we serve, breaking down systemic barriers, and transforming lives- one action at a time. Taskrabbit is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, military/veteran status, or disability status. Taskrabbit is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. Taskrabbit will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. Taskrabbit will never use text or chat applications to conduct interviews. We have a thoughtful and interactive interview process that includes an initial recruiter phone screen and several video-based interviews with our hiring teams. Communications will always be conducted by taskrabbit.com domain names.