Base Salary
$230k - $290k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design and evolve reliable, low-latency search and serving infrastructure for live-commerce traffic spikes and major sales events.
- Build retrieval systems that allow feed and search teams to add candidate sources safely and quickly.
- Partner with ranking and machine learning engineers to productionize models and features with appropriate latency and freshness.
- Set technical direction for Discovery Platform and influence cross-team roadmaps using data and product outcomes.
- Own complex systems end to end, including architecture, implementation, production operations, and on-call.
- Contribute hands-on through coding, design and code reviews, architectural documentation, mentorship, and improvements to engineering and operational practices.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience, including building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
- Track record of leading substantial technical initiatives across teams and shipping solutions through ambiguity.
- Experience designing reliable, low-latency backend systems such as search infrastructure, retrieval services, event-driven systems, or streaming data pipelines.
- Experience with search or recommendations at scale is strongly preferred.
- Hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, Redis or Valkey, and Kafka or similar streaming systems.
- Understanding of recommendation systems, including candidate generation, ranking, and feature serving, with the ability to partner effectively with machine learning engineers.
- Strong product instincts and a commitment to hands-on engineering, architectural judgment, mentorship, and improving design, code, and operational quality.
Benefits
- Flexible work from home or from a global office hub, with required commuting distance to the New York City, San Francisco, or Seattle hub and valued in-person planning and problem-solving.
- Generous holiday and time-off policy.
- Medical, dental, and vision health insurance options.
- Work-from-home support, including a home-office setup allowance and monthly cell phone and internet allowance.
- Wellness, childcare, family-planning, adoption, and fertility benefits.
- 401(k) with Traditional and Roth options in the US, including employer match up to 4% of base salary, and international pension plans.
- Monthly allowance to use Whatnot as both a buyer and seller.
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave plus one month of gradual return to work, subject to applicable country leave requirements.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Whatnot
Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in the US, UK, and Europe. Millions of people come to Whatnot every day to buy, sell, and connect over the things they love, from sneakers to sports cards, vintage fashion to fine jewelry, comics to Pokémon, beauty, electronics, and hundreds of other categories. In 2025, live sales on Whatnot surpassed $8B, more than doubling the year before. Over 20 million accounts were created last year alone, and we have been the #1 shopping app in both the US and UK. We've built a real business, but we're nowhere near done. Live commerce at this scale has never been done in the West, which means the people here now are shaping how an entirely new industry develops. The pace here is fast and the expectations are high. We move quickly, prioritize ruthlessly, and trust people to own their work end-to-end. In return, careers grow faster, impact is real, and your colleagues will raise your standards. It's an environment built for people who want to do the best work of their careers alongside others doing the same. We're a remote, co-located team with hubs in the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, and Germany, and we're hiring across every function.