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 long-term 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 architecture decisions, technical roadmaps, design reviews, code reviews, mentoring, and production operations.
- Partner with product and machine learning teams to solve marketplace problems and participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- 8+ years of backend or distributed-systems engineering experience for Staff level, or 10+ years for Senior Staff level.
- Strong mastery of distributed-systems fundamentals, software design, algorithms, and data structures.
- Experience with high-throughput, low-latency services, stream processing, messaging, caches, time-series stores, and data pipelines.
- Proficiency in one or more programming languages such as Python or Go, plus scripting experience.
- Track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, particularly in ads, ranking, or machine-learning-serving contexts.
- Strong communication, cross-organizational influence, ownership, and end-to-end delivery skills.
- Preferred experience includes high-growth startup environments, ads systems, infrastructure, and international commerce.
Benefits
- 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.
- Care benefits including monthly wellness and annual childcare allowances, plus a lifetime family-planning benefit.
- 401(k) Traditional and Roth plans in the US with an employer match of 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.
- Remote co-located work model 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.