Software Engineer, Customer Studio Backend

About Hightouch

Hightouch’s mission is to empower everyone to take action on their data. Through our Reverse ETL platform, business and data users can seamlessly sync data from where it resides, such as warehouses and databases, to where it is needed, including operational systems and SaaS tools. Traditionally, acting on data has required engineering time and bandwidth, and left most business users stuck with charts and reports that are unable to take automated action on their data. With Hightouch, every business user, without writing any code, can activate data to streamline critical processes, improve marketing performance, and scale operations.

Our team operates with a focus on making a meaningful impact for our customers. We believe in approaching challenges with a first principles thinking mindset, moving quickly and embracing our value of efficient execution, and treating each other with compassion and kindness. We look for team members that are strong communicators, have a growth mindset, and are motivated and persistent in achieving our goals.

Hundreds of companies use Hightouch, including Spotify, Ramp, Grammarly, NBA, Plaid, and Betterment. We’re based in San Francisco, are remote-friendly, and backed by leading investors such as Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Growth, Bain Capital Ventures, Y-Combinator, and Afore Capital.

About the Role

Building upon Reverse ETL’s ability to use SQL to sync to any SaaS tool, Customer Studio is Hightouch’s second major product that provides a purpose-built no-code suite of features that enables anyone, regardless of their SQL experience, to activate data directly from their warehouse. Despite being a small team (3 engineers, 1 PM, 1 designer), Customer Studio is our fastest growing product and already accounts for nearly half of our revenue, which also gives this role the potential to have significant impact!

We’re looking to add a product-minded backend engineer to the team. The ideal candidate will be comfortable diving deep into backend and distributed systems and think holistically about architecture, scalability, maintainability, and reliability. We also are looking for someone with strong customer and product thinking and who feels comfortable writing and engaging with product specs.

Some of the problems we’ll be working on include:

• Data Warehouse Performance: We’re consistently pushing the limits of what data warehouses can handle in terms of speed, performance, and interactivity. We explore optimizations generally (e.g. optimizing queries, storing pre-computed state), as well as investigate warehouse-specific improvements.
• Analytics and Experimentation: How can Hightouch help customers build segments and decide what data they want to sync? How can we facilitate experimentation to downstream tools, including tracking the performance of different audiences?
• Real-time Audience Syncing: Our users are always interested in faster syncing and fresher data. As warehouses become more real-time and adopt technologies like CDC, we’re excited to explore real-time audience computation and syncing.
• Generative AI: We’re continuously working on making the user experience of acting on data more seamless, and are optimistic generative AI can enhance user workflows.

We are looking for talented, intellectually curious, and motivated individuals who are interested in tackling the problems above. This is a senior role, but we focus on impact and potential for growth more than years of experience. The salary range for this position is $170,000 - $240,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy.

Interview Process

Our interview process focuses on evaluating fit for the most important dimensions of the role: product sense, ability to architect backend and distributed systems, and alignment with Hightouch’s values. Notably, we don’t do any programming interviews as we believe they are low signal to noise and aren’t a good evaluation mechanism.

• Intro Call [15-30m]: Introductory call with either a member of our recruiting team or the hiring manager to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• System Design Screen [60m]: Designing a feature end-to-end, including touching the database, API, web frontend, and data warehouse.
• Product Sense Interview [60m]: Coming up with potential product and feature ideas in response to customer requirements. Focuses primarily on product solutioning with some technical analysis in determining the feasibility of ideas.
• System Design Interview [90m]: Work with the interviewer to architect a system at a conceptual level. The problem will be at a pretty high level - and have both product and customer requirements as well as technical.
• Hiring Manager Interview [30m]: Chat with hiring manager about past experiences and future operating preferences to assess fit on company values and operating principles.