Software Engineer, Customer Studio Backend

About Hightouch

Hightouch’s mission is to empower everyone to take action on their data. Hundreds of companies, including Autotrader, Calendly, Cars.com, Monday.com, and PetSmart, trust Hightouch to power their growth.

We pioneered the Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP), which lets companies use their own data warehouse to collect, prepare, and activate customer data for marketing personalization and business operations. Our new AI Decisioning platform goes a step further, allowing marketers to set goals and guardrails that AI agents can then use to personalize 1:1 customer interactions. Traditionally, only technical teams had the skills to access and use customer data. With Hightouch, every business user can deliver personalized customer experiences, optimize performance marketing, and move faster by leveraging data and AI across their organization.

Our team focuses on making a meaningful impact for our customers. We approach challenges with a first-principles mindset, move quickly and efficiently, and treat each other with compassion and kindness. We look for team members who are strong communicators, have a growth mindset, and are motivated and persistent in achieving our goals.

What else? We’re based in San Francisco but have team members all over the world. Our Series C put us at a $1.2B valuation, and we are backed by leading investors such as Sapphire Ventures, 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. The product has grown extremely quickly, now accounting for half of our revenue, and we’re continuing to invest aggressively in this area. There are still a ton of exciting projects and challenges ahead, 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 $180,000 - $320,000 USD per year, which is location independent in accordance with our remote-first policy. We also offer meaningful equity compensation in the form of ISO options, and offer early exercise and a 10 year post-termination exercise window.

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.

• Recruiter Screen [30m]: Introductory call with our recruiting team to get to know each other and see if the role could be a good mutual fit.
• System Design Screen [45m]: Designing a data processing feature end-to-end.
• Hiring Manager Interview [30m]: Chat with hiring manager about past experiences and future operating preferences to assess fit on company values and operating principles.
• 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.