Software Engineer, Control Plane

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

In the last 12-18 months, Hightouch has been adopted by larger and larger customers and enterprises. These enterprises have both high data scale as well as complex organizations with many individuals and teams using Hightouch on a daily basis. The Control Plane team focuses on building user-friendly but powerful tools and products for enterprises to efficiently onboard onto Hightouch and manage and scale their Hightouch deployments.

We’re looking to add a product-minded backend engineer to the team. The ideal candidate will be comfortable diving deep into backend, distributed systems, and asynchronous workflows and think holistically about architecture, scalability, maintainability, and reliability. We are also 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:

• Roles, Permissions, and Access Control: We have a flexible and powerful access control framework that allows enterprise admins to configure the right level of permissions for different groups of users and teams within their company. As Hightouch expands our product lines, the Control Plane team will also adapt and extend our access control capabilities to support that growth.
• Change Management: When a customer’s underlying data model or data warehouse changes, this can have downstream impact on their Customer Studio schema, audiences, and other syncs and data pipelines. What tools can we build for admins to better manage these types of changes at scale?
• Data Warehouse Performance and Costs: As customers continue to adopt Hightouch within their organizations and their usage of Hightouch grows, they’ll drive more warehouse activity and compute from Hightouch. How can we help admins better understand and optimize warehouse performance and costs as a result of Hightouch activity?

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 - $260,000 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 [60m]: 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.