Application Security Engineer II

Thumbtack helps millions of people confidently care for their homes. Thumbtack is the one app you need to take care of and improve your home — from personalized guidance to AI tools and a best-in-class hiring experience. Every day in every county of the U.S., people turn to Thumbtack to complete urgent repairs, seasonal maintenance and bigger improvements. We help homeowners know which projects to do, when to do them and who to hire from our growing community of 300,000 local service businesses. If making an impact inspires you, join us. Imagine what we’ll build together. About the Cybersecurity Team The Security Engineering team at Thumbtack is focused on enabling innovation at scale by making the secure path the easiest path. We believe strong security is not a blocker to velocity, but a force multiplier when it is designed into systems, platforms, and developer workflows from the start. We partner closely with Product, Engineering, Platform, and Data teams to shape system design, guide architectural decisions, and evolve Thumbtack’s security posture as the company scales. Through collaboration, automation, and thoughtful tradeoffs, we help ensure Thumbtack can ship fast, innovate boldly, and maintain customer trust. The Challenge As Thumbtack scales and increasingly incorporates AI-powered features into our products and internal systems, security must evolve without slowing innovation. The number of services, deployment patterns, and data flows continues to grow, and traditional approaches that rely heavily on manual reviews or after-the-fact controls do not scale to meet this need. Instead, the challenge is to design security into the system itself. This means building secure defaults, paved paths, and reusable building blocks that product and engineering teams can adopt with minimal friction. By embedding security directly into architectures, tooling, and infrastructure, we reduce cognitive load on engineers and enable teams to move quickly and confidently while meaningfully lowering risk. What you’ll do • Own and deliver application security work within defined projects or domains. Contribute to cross-functional security initiatives, executing clearly scoped pieces of larger efforts. • Identify, prioritize, and help remediate application security risks in partnership with engineering teams. • Apply secure-by-default patterns and approved architectures when designing or reviewing systems. • Partner with product and engineering teams to assess risk and recommend practical, risk-informed security improvements. Participate in application security design reviews and threat modeling for new and existing systems. • Write code, reviews, and documentation to address vulnerabilities and reduce recurring classes of issues. • Participate in security incident response and contribute to post-incident analysis and remediation. In order to be successful, you must bring • 4+ years of experience in software engineering and/or application security. • Practical experience with application security techniques such as threat modeling, secure design patterns, authentication and authorization, secrets management, and vulnerability remediation. Strong understanding of secure coding practices and common application security risks (e.g., OWASP Top 10). • Ability to assess security risks and break down complex problems, reason about tradeoffs, make sound recommendations, and deliver practical, impactful solutions with guidance when needed. • Strong sense of ownership over assigned work, with the ability to execute independently and follow through. • Clear written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain security issues to engineers with varying levels of security expertise. • A growth mindset and interest i