How Thumbtack built an AI pipeline that generates, evaluates, and refines marketing content at scale, maintaining human-level quality programmatically.The ChallengeThumbtack connects customers with local service professionals across a wide range of categories and geographies. For many customers, the first entry point to Thumbtack is a landing page. When someone searches Google for “plumber near me” or “duct cleaning Raleigh NC”, these pages are where they land, and they are the user’s first impression of the marketplace for that query. The footprint targeted by this work is roughly 500K such…
Reusing what we already had, treating embeddings as data, and lowering the next team’s costToday, an ML engineer at Thumbtack can stand up production vector search without negotiating database access, building a custom ETL, or writing a query service. The team brings their choice of embedding model, the data, and the query; the platform handles what connects them. It took several iterations to get to this point. In this post we’ll walk through how we got there and the three principles that shaped what we built.A vector database stores high-dimensional numeric arrays (embeddings) and serves…
How we moved 1,500 Android screenshot tests to Roborazzi.IntroductionIf you’re a mobile developer you’re probably no stranger to screenshot tests. Making sure that layouts remain consistent as time goes on and code changes is important for ensuring functionality and accessibility. Since Thumbtack uses Kotlin and Jetpack Compose for its Android apps, we had historically been using Firebase Test Lab to capture and compare layouts. However, using Firebase can be slow, tedious, and error-prone, so we decided it was time for a change. Instead of Firebase, we decided to migrate to using Roborazzi,…
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 goes wrong, rolling back is a button away. It’s the return on years of platform work, so routine now that we mostly forget it’s there. Which is the point: Safety is built into the road, not into how carefully each person drives.Changing pricing data never had that…
A look at compensating for position bias in recommender systems using negative sampling strategiesBy: Andrew Morss, Senior Applied ScientistIntroductionA 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, push you songs on Spotify and customize your Steam store. If you’re a homeowner, Thumbtack’s recommender systems can suggest home projects for you such as house cleaning or lawn mowing.Thumbtack connects users with…
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 whether we should adopt AI-assisted development and became about how. Lately, it is moving towards the adoption of end to end agentic workflows for development.I’ve been thinking a lot about what this shift means, not just for our…
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 ScientistEvaluating AI at ScaleIntroductionAI is reshaping how people interact with products, and Thumbtack is no exception. We’re introducing AI into more aspects of our customer and local service professional (pro) experiences — from helping customers articulate what they need, to generating helpful summaries, to offering clearer explanations of how pros may fit those needs.But evaluating…
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 apps shipping reliably. We also build AI-powered developer tooling — 35+ AI Agent Skills, MCP integrations for Jenkins, Figma, Firebase, and Xcode — that help the broader iOS team ship faster.Over the past few quarters, we built Smart Test…
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 make it easy to share incremental progress with designers. In code reviews, they provide a great way for reviewers to “see” what the UI code is doing. Finally, they are very easy to write!But they were not always easy to run. Because they…
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?I’m working on building a Marketing Analytics Agent. It’s an AI-powered marketing expert that provides companywide support, regardless of technical background. The idea is simple: marketing…
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 values.I took a very intentional approach to my search. I reviewed the career sites of 106 companies to deeply understand their cultures, and from that process I applied and interviewed with four outstanding organizations. Each had strong teams and compelling missions, but Thumbtack…
Meet Ashmann Syngle, Software EngineerI 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 OnOver the past year, I’ve worked on several projects that make it easier for local service professionals on Thumbtack to connect with homeowners and grow their businesses. Most recently, I’ve helped launch new pricing features and experiments that improve how Thumbtack pros are matched with the right opportunities.Right now, I’m focusing on…
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