Base Salary
$245k - $290k/yr
Responsibilities
- Embed with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to improve system reliability, performance, and scalability through hands-on coding.
- Investigate traffic, latency, error, and cost anomalies across services, storage, clients, and team boundaries, and trace them to root cause.
- Connect operational degradations to business impact and identify which issues require action for specific user cohorts.
- Address production risks and bottlenecks across payments, live video, search, bidding, and security systems.
- Eliminate systemic classes of scale problems rather than fixing isolated incidents.
- Prepare for peak events through capacity modeling, load testing, and failure drills.
- Improve observability and apply AI to anomaly detection, on-call assistance, remediation, and toil reduction.
- Share on-call responsibilities, escalate live production incidents, and lead incident response for complex cross-team failures.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- 9+ years building and debugging production services at scale.
- Software engineering experience with a strong focus on production systems and writing code.
- Strong systems and distributed-systems fundamentals, including failure modes, saturation, queueing behavior, cascading failure, and Linux, networking, and storage under load.
- Depth in observability and production debugging, plus experience in capacity and performance engineering, load and resilience testing, incident command, or large-scale migrations under production constraints.
- Ability to work effectively embedded with other teams and improve unfamiliar codebases and systems.
- Fluency across languages and technologies and comfort with cloud-native environments such as AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.
- Experience with high-traffic, real-time, event-driven, or live-streaming systems is a bonus.
- Must live within commuting distance of the San Francisco or New York City hub.
Benefits
- Flexible time off policy 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, including monthly wellness support and an annual childcare allowance.
- Family-planning benefit covering expenses such as adoption or fertility services.
- 401(k) plans with employer matching up to 4% of base salary in the US and pension plans internationally.
- Monthly allowance to use the Whatnot app as both a buyer and seller.
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave plus a one-month gradual return to work.
- Flexible work from home or from global office hubs, with in-person time valued for planning, problem-solving, and connection.
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.