Making large pricing changes safe to run, safe to resume, and safe to undo. Most days, shipping code to production at Thumbtack is a non-event. You merge your change, a deployment pipeline takes it from there and it rolls out while you monitor the rollout. If a deploy stalls, the system already knows which step it stalled on. If it…
Thumbtack
https://www.thumbtack.com/engineering/ · 12 posts · history since 2025 · active
22 Jul
20 Jul
A look at compensating for position bias in recommender systems using negative sampling strategies By: Andrew Morss, Senior Applied Scientist Introduction A recommender system is a machine learning model that, given a user and a catalog of items, predicts which items that user is most likely to want. Recommenders set your YouTube playlist, determine what items Amazon suggests for you,…
22 May
Over the past year, the way we use AI at Thumbtack has gone through a few phases. Early on it was mostly curiosity, people experimenting with ChatGPT and Copilot on side projects, sharing tips in Slack. Then the models got noticeably better at working inside real, mature codebases (not just greenfield projects) and the conversation shifted. It stopped being about…
29 Apr
A practical look at how Thumbtack navigates evaluation for emerging AI experiences and what we’ve learned along the way. By: Shishir Dash , Director of Applied Science & Teja Venkat Kolli , Senior Applied Scientist Evaluating AI at Scale Introduction AI is reshaping how people interact with products, and Thumbtack is no exception. We’re introducing AI into more aspects of…
21 Apr
Every iOS pull request at Thumbtack used to wait 30 to 40 minutes for Continuous Integration (CI) — sometimes over an hour on Fridays. We built Smart Test Selection (STS) to cut that in half. Here’s how. I’m a Senior Software Engineer on the iOS Infrastructure team. We own the CI/CD pipelines, build tooling, and shared frameworks that keep Thumbtack’s…
31 Mar
How we chose Roborazzi for fast, easy, and high-fidelity screenshot tests of our Android apps, without needing to run them on an emulator. As mentioned in our earlier blog post , screenshot tests are a fundamental part of our testing pyramid at Thumbtack. They validate that our UI code renders correctly. They catch UI regressions as our code evolves. They…
5 Mar
Kenza Boulisfane, Software Engineer at Thumbtack, works at the intersection of data, AI, and real business impact. In this Q&A, she shares how she’s building an AI-powered Marketing Analytics Agent designed to make complex marketing data accessible to everyone. She also reflects on team culture, technical challenges, and why diverse perspectives make engineering stronger. What are you currently working on?…
5 Feb
A Q&A with Brett Shouse, Senior Software Engineer. As an engineer, what drew you to Thumbtack? I joined Thumbtack in March of 2025, and from day one it’s felt like the right place to grow, build, and make a real impact. I was ready for a fresh challenge and wanted to help evolve a business that truly aligned with my…
3 Dec 2025
Meet Ashmann Syngle, Software Engineer I joined Thumbtack in July 2022, so it’s been just over three years now! I first heard about the company from my former engineering manager at HBO Max, who encouraged me to apply. I’m so glad he did. What I’m Working On Over the past year, I’ve worked on several projects that make it easier…
13 Nov 2025
At Thumbtack, collaboration has always been our edge; it’s what allows our teams to move fast, think creatively, and solve complex problems together. Our Decide & Resolve team works to empower homeowners to confidently hire the best local service professionals through relevant and personalized recommendations. Recently, we’ve introduced a new cross-functional process that combines the power of AI, accessible tooling,…
10 Oct 2025
As a fast-growing home services platform, we heavily utilize machine learning to elevate user experience and improve business processes such as reducing spam, improving search results, and providing recommendations. In recent years, Generative AI has taken the world by storm as a powerful addition to traditional ML. We embraced this mega trend by incorporating LLMs into various areas of our…
13 Aug 2025
Swift concurrency was first introduced in Swift 5.5 around the fall of 2021. It promised to deliver compile time thread safety that was easy to use. We began to adopt Swift concurrency internally quite early, however, as many other developers have learned, we learned that this compile time safety comes with several caveats. Out of the box in Swift 5,…