Base Salary
$207k - $290k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead research projects involving marketplace simulation, auction and allocation mechanics, long-term objective modeling, exploration, information value, and marketplace experimentation.
- Take research ideas from literature review and prototyping through offline validation, shadow testing, and online experiments with partner teams.
- Build learned simulators and surrogate models that predict ranking, policy, and long-term marketplace effects.
- Model auction, bidding, discovery exposure allocation, and allocation to rising sellers.
- Develop off-policy evaluation, switchback and interference-robust experiment designs, and variance-reduction methods.
- Contribute to publications, open-source work, and public technical benchmarks.
- Influence roadmaps and align cross-functional teams.
Requirements
- 5+ years of industry experience building and deploying machine learning models to solve user problems at scale.
- Depth in at least one of recommendation systems, causal inference, off-policy evaluation, reinforcement learning and bandits, auction or mechanism design, or marketplace experimentation.
- Track record of applying scientific methods to real-world problems using consumer-scale data.
- Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, and common machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and XGBoost.
- Strong grounding in applied statistics, experiment design, and theoretical machine learning.
- Strong communication and leadership skills in a remote environment.
- Preferred: experience with two-sided marketplaces, advertising and auction systems, pricing, simulators, or economic models of platform behavior.
Benefits
- Flexible time off and company-wide holidays, including spring and winter breaks.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance options.
- Work-from-home support, including a home office setup allowance and monthly cell phone and internet allowance.
- Care benefits, wellness allowance, and annual childcare allowance.
- Lifetime family-planning benefit for adoption or fertility expenses.
- 401(k) Traditional and Roth plans in the US with employer matching up to 4% of base salary, plus international pension plans.
- Monthly allowance to use the Whatnot app.
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave plus one month of gradual return to work.
- Remote co-located work with this role requiring residence within commuting distance, defined as 50 miles, of the New York City hub.
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.