Y Combinator Principal Software Engineer, Consumer Experience
Meet Fetch Engineering
At Fetch, engineering is driven by curiosity, ownership, and a bias toward action. We operate in complex problem spaces where the right answer is not always clear, and success depends on adaptability, critical thinking, and informed decision-making. Our engineers are comfortable navigating ambiguity, understanding tradeoffs, gathering context, and turning uncertainty into progress while maintaining high technical standards.
Engineers at Fetch take pride in building reliable, scalable systems that serve millions of users. You will contribute directly to the codebase, collaborate closely with cross-functional partners, and help shape best practices that elevate the quality of our work. We foster a culture of mentorship and collaboration, where engineers grow by learning from one another and holding a high bar for quality, reliability, and impact.
About the Role:
Fetch is entering a pivotal phase where user lifecycle growth is the company's north star for 2026. Consumer Experience spans the systems and product surfaces that shape how millions of people discover, adopt, and stay with Fetch: personalization, notifications, recommendations, experimentation, onboarding, monetization, loyalty, and the growth surfaces that connect them. These surfaces cut across multiple teams and orgs, and the technical decisions made here compound into company-level outcomes.
As a Principal Software Engineer on Consumer Experience, you will own the multi-year technical direction for this domain. You will identify the highest-leverage opportunities, frame the hard problems before they are obvious, and set the architecture and standards that other teams build against. This is a senior technical leadership role for someone who can operate at the intersection of product, engineering, data, and user experience, and who is trusted by VP and executive leadership to shape where consumer experience goes next.
This is a highly hands-on role. You will still be in the codebase, but your leverage comes from the direction you set, the bets you help the company make, and the senior engineers you raise along the way.
This is a full-time role that can be held from one of our US offices or remotely in the United States.
What you’ll do at Fetch (Role Responsibilities):
- Set the technical vision for Consumer Experience
- Define the multi-year technical strategy for consumer-facing growth systems and articulate how it ladders up to Fetch's lifecycle growth goals. Identify where the domain needs to go before the roadmap makes it obvious.
- Frame the problems, not just the solutions
- Partner with Product, Design, Data, and executive stakeholders to surface the highest-leverage opportunities across the user lifecycle, define the problems worth solving, and shape the roadmap that follows. Turn ambiguity into a direction the org can execute against.
- Set direction other teams build against
- Establish the architectural patterns, standards, and technical approaches for personalization, experimentation, notifications, recommendations, and engagement infrastructure that teams across consumer surfaces adopt. Make the foundational bets that shape how these systems evolve for years.
- Drive experimentation and product iteration at scale
- Raise the ceiling on how quickly and safely teams can test, learn, and ship across the user lifecycle. Balance experimentation velocity against long-term product quality and platform health, and make those tradeoffs legible to the org.
- Move engagement, retention, and conversion at the company level
- Design and guide the systems that measurably influence engagement, activation, conversion, retention, and monetization for millions of users. Connect technical decisions to business outcomes leadership tracks.
- Act as a technical leader across teams and orgs
- Influence technical direction well beyond your immediate teams, resolve the hard cross-org architectural questions, and create alignment on consumer growth systems where no single team owns the answer.
- Raise the bar for senior engineers
- Mentor and grow staff and principal-level engineers. Set the standard for engineering fundamentals, pragmatic decision-making, operational excellence, and product-minded engineering, and multiply your impact through the people you develop.
- Accelerate developer and product velocity
- Champion the tools, workflows, and practices that speed up product development and experimentation, including AI-assisted development workflows, observability improvements, and scalable internal tooling.
- Model Technical Excellence
- Lead by example through thoughtful architecture, pragmatic decisions, and strong fundamentals. Promote a culture of ownership, accountability, and measurable impact.
In your Toolbox (Minimum Requirements):
- 15+ years building and scaling consumer-facing products, with a track record of company-level technical impact
- Experience setting multi-year technical direction for a consumer domain that spans multiple teams, where others built against the patterns and standards you established
- Deep experience building product experiences that directly move engagement, discovery, activation, retention, conversion, or monetization
- Experience across consumer growth areas such as search, recommendations, personalization, notifications, onboarding, feeds, messaging, experimentation, or lifecycle experiences
- Proven ability to frame ambiguous problems and shape roadmap and technical strategy alongside Product, Data, and executive leadership, not just execute a defined plan
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical and product decisions across multiple teams and orgs without direct authority
- Experience building and evolving high-scale consumer web or mobile applications
- Strong product and user experience instincts, including thoughtful decision-making around experimentation, usability, performance, and long-term product quality
- Strong engineering fundamentals and the ability to build reliable, scalable, maintainable systems
- Strong programming skills and the ability to operate effectively across the stack when needed
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. Equivalent practical experience may be considered
Nice to haves/Bonus Points (Preferred Requirements):
- Experience building or scaling experimentation systems and running large-scale A/B testing programs
- Experience owning lifecycle engagement systems such as notifications, messaging, recommendations, personalization, or retention
- Experience with growth, retention, loyalty, marketplace, social, or monetization-focused consumer products
- Experience supporting high-scale consumer mobile or web experiences
- Familiarity with analytics, experimentation, and personalization systems that help teams understand and improve user behavior
- Experience raising product iteration and experimentation velocity through tooling, workflows, or internal capabilities
- Ability to clearly communicate product, technical, and user experience tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences
Compensation: At Fetch, we offer competitive compensation packages including base, equity, and benefits to the exceptional folks we hire. Discover our benefits and how our employees live rewarded at .