Staff Back-End Engineer, Commerce

Taskrabbit•San Francisco, CA

19h•Hybrid

About The Position

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. 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.

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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.
Lead complex, cross-team technical initiatives involving Taskrabbit, Stripe, and Sovos. Collaborate across engineering, finance, and product to align on architecture and manage dependencies.
Translate ambiguous, high-stakes business goals into clear technical strategies, designs, and experiments.
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.
Serve as a Ruby on Rails subject-matter expert, champion high-quality testing (RSpec) for financial systems, mentor engineers, and produce durable technical documentation.
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.