Base Salary
$245k - $300k/yr
Responsibilities
- Architect and lead high-throughput, low-latency backend systems for ad auctions, bidding, pacing, ranking, and delivery.
- Design auction mechanisms balancing seller value, buyer experience, marketplace efficiency, and ecosystem health.
- Build services for budget management, allocation, forecasting, experimentation, attribution, and measurement.
- Integrate real-time auction services with machine learning models, data pipelines, and marketplace systems.
- Own performance, resilience, observability, scalability, service contracts, fault isolation, and capacity planning for critical services.
- Lead technical decisions and develop the roadmap for auction infrastructure and monetization capabilities.
- Partner with product and machine learning teams to solve marketplace problems with backend and algorithmic systems.
- Lead design and code reviews, mentor senior engineers, and raise engineering standards.
- Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- 8+ years of backend or distributed systems engineering experience for Staff level; 10+ years for Senior Staff level.
- Strong mastery of distributed systems fundamentals, including consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, and state management.
- Experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing.
- Strong software design, algorithmic, and data-structure skills.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python or Go, plus scripting.
- Experience with messaging systems, caches, time-series stores, and data pipelines.
- Track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, especially in advertising, ranking, or machine learning serving contexts.
- Strong communication, cross-organizational influence, ownership, and end-to-end delivery skills.
- Startup experience at a high-growth company is preferred.
- Experience with advertising systems, infrastructure, and international commerce is preferred.
Benefits
- Generous holiday and time-off policy.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance options.
- Remote work support, including a home office setup allowance and monthly cell phone and internet allowance.
- Care benefits, including wellness, childcare, and family-planning allowances.
- 401(k) plans in the US with employer matching up to 4% of base salary and international pension plans.
- Monthly allowance to use the Whatnot app as both a buyer and seller.
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave plus one month of gradual return to work.
- Remote co-located team with hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia.
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.