Software Engineer, Whatnot
Core Machine Learning
$180-300k
Plus stock options
Live stream platform & marketplace
Open for applications
Live stream platform & marketplace
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$180-300k
Plus stock options
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
Role
Who you are
- We're looking for entrepreneurial software engineers who thrive on ambiguous, 0-to-1 work
- Strong applicants display exceptional business judgement and are equally comfortable contributing to production infrastructure and training the models that run on it. They build for the long term while finding ways to aggressively pull forward business impact
- As our next Software Engineer, Core Machine Learning you should have 4+ years of professional experience, plus:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent work experience
- 2+ years of software engineering experience building and maintaining production systems at consumer scale
- 2+ years of hands-on experience training and deploying traditional ML models in production (e.g. classification, ranking, or regression models using PyTorch, LightGBM, or scikit-learn)
- Ability to work autonomously and drive initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams
- Experience with operational, search, and key-value databases such as PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis
- Firm grasp of visualization tools for monitoring and logging e.g. DataDog, Grafana
- Familiarity with cloud computing platforms and managed services such as AWS Kubernetes, Sagemaker, Lambda, Kinesis, S3, EC2, EKS/ECS, Apache Kafka, Flink
- Professionalism around collaborating in a remote working environment and well tested, reproducible work
- Exceptional documentation and communication skills
What the job involves
- You’ll design and deploy both traditional ML models and infrastructure (contextual bandits to manage ad spend, shipment ETA predictions) and LLM-powered systems (RAG pipelines, human-in-the-loop evaluation frameworks) to address the business’s most pressing problems
- Your job will change every ~12 months as we hand off stable products and pivot to address the business’s next big need
- Develop and deploy new both production machine learning algorithms and core infrastructure to enrich the buyer and seller experience
- Contribute to and set direction across the entire machine learning development process: opportunity sizing, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, load testing, deployment, and alerting
- Design and implement supporting software infrastructure to unblock your work: streaming pipelines, async worker queues, event enrichment infrastructure, continuous training loops, model monitoring systems, LLM tool access controls, and dynamic agent evaluation framework to give just a few examples
- Define project roadmaps that deliver value quickly while building towards scalable, extensible long-term systems
- Bridge research and production: take an experimental idea and harden it into a scalable, well-tested, monitored system
- Communicate tradeoffs and findings clearly to product and leadership
Our take
Live shopping is changing the way people engage with eCommerce and Whatnot is one of the key platforms driving this shift. The company operates across the US, UK, and Europe, where millions of people connect each day to buy, sell, and build communities around shared interests.
Founded in 2019, Whatnot allows real-time auctions where buyers can watch sellers showcase products and share their expertise, creating a more interactive and personal shopper experience. Sellers include individual creators and small businesses who use live shows to reach audiences and grow their online presence.
As of 2025, the company reports over $6B in sales, with sellers earning significantly more on average than other major marketplaces. And with a range of investor support, Whatnot is committed to developing new ways to make online shopping more social and community-driven.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Meet the team
Jon Malkemus, VP Product Design
Insights
54% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 8 rounds)
Oct 2025
$225m
SERIES F
Jan 2025
$265m
SERIES E
Total funding: $974.2m
Company benefits
- Wellness: Health, dental, vision, and life insurance plans. We also cover some of the cost for your dependents as well.
- Compensation: Generous compensation, including a competitive base salary and equity. Whatnot offers monthly reimbursement for internet and phone costs, along with a one-time home office set-up allowance. Whatnot offers a pension plan and matches employee contributions of up to 4% of the employee’s base salary.
- Recharge: Whatnot gives you the freedom to take time off as you see fit. And, we take company-wide Winter and Summer breaks so we can recharge. Whatnot provides a monthly allowance for wellness expenses. We know that to take care of our customers, we have to take care of ourselves. Supplemental health and life insurance coverage comes standard at Whatnot. 16 weeks of paid parental leave, and an additional one-month gradual return-to-work period.* Plus an additional childcare allowance, and a lifetime allowance for family planning, including adoption and fertility expenses. *The leave allowances provided by Whatnot may be dictated / informed by your country’s legal requirements,
- Flexibility: As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together.
Company values
- Always listen to customers
- Move uncomfortably fast
- Prioritize impact ruthlessly
- Own everything and nothing
- Set crazy goals
- Provide extreme transparency
- Optimize for the upside
- Team over ego
- Figure it out
- Deeply understand why
- Have fun & be kind
Company HQ
Venice, Los Angeles, CA
Articles
Leadership
Grant LaFontaine
(Co-Founder & CEO)Former Product Marketing Manager at Google, Project Manager at Facebook. Also co-founded Kit.
Logan Head
(Co-Founder & CTO)Experience in Engineering, including at Maker's Row, Factr, and Flight Club. Former Senior Product Manager at GOAT.
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