Data Engineer, Whatnot
$180-260k
+ Equity
More information about location
Live stream platform & marketplace for collectibles
Open for applications
Live stream platform & marketplace for collectibles
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$180-260k
+ Equity
More information about location
501-1000 employees
Company mission
Whatnot missions is to enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
Role
Who you are
- We’ve learned that low ego, a growth mindset, and a bias toward action create outsized impact at Whatnot
- Have 3+ years of experience as a data or software engineer building data warehouses, distributed data systems, or event-driven architectures
- Can design and implement data models using dimensional, Data Vault, or ledger-style techniques that support analytical and transactional workloads
- Have deep hands-on expertise with modern data tooling across ingestion (e.g., Kafka, Debezium), transformation (dbt, Spark, Flink), orchestration (Dagster, Airflow), and observability (Monte Carlo, Great Expectations)
- Have operated cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift, including schema design, cost optimization, and workload tuning
- Are comfortable writing production-grade code in Python or SQL languages, and integrating with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code workflows
- Enjoy partnering across disciplines—engineering, product, analytics—to translate messy business requirements into elegant data systems
- Thrive as a self-starter in a fast-moving environment, owning both the technical design and the operational outcomes of your work
- If designing the data backbone that powers Whatnot’s growth, insights, and product innovation excites you, we’d love to meet you
What the job involves
- Data is crucial to Whatnot’s mission to bring people together through commerce
- As our newest Data Engineer, you’ll build and scale the systems that power data-driven decisions across the company
- You’ll work directly with stakeholders across the business – such as product, sales, marketing, finance, and trust teams – to design reliable data architectures, ship resilient pipelines, and create the foundational data products that power Whatnot’s internal and external growth
- Own data architecture end-to-end. Define how we capture, model, and serve critical business data—then implement it in production. You’ll make architectural decisions around storage formats, compute patterns, and SLAs that balance cost, scalability, and consistency
- Build mission-critical pipelines. Develop and operate streaming and batch data workflows that process high-volume events across multiple domains—user activity, transactions, experimentation, marketing performance, and operational telemetry—with tight guarantees for latency, completeness, and accuracy
- Design and implement canonical models. Create domain-oriented data models that serve as the source of truth for analytics, ML, and real-time applications. Establish and enforce modeling standards, ownership boundaries, and data contracts across teams
- Enforce data quality at scale. Build tests, lineage, monitoring, and reconciliation systems that make every dataset observable and every anomaly actionable
- Automate operational workflows. Partner with business systems and platform teams to eliminate manual data handoffs and reconcile data across services, warehouses, and external systems
- Enable insights and experimentation. Support analytics, ML, and product engineering teams by exposing high-quality, low-latency data through semantic layers, APIs, and real-time query systems
Our take
The collectible toy market is large, and Whatnot has built a unique social platform that enables sellers to use livestreams to showcase their products and reach more buyers. The company’s focus is on collectible toys, some of which are rare and can cost thousands of dollars, and has also expanded to sports cards.
The idea of Whatnot was led by buyer trends. Instagram's live feature became a popular place for selling toys and trading cards, but of course was not set up to facilitate bidding or handling payments after a sale occurs. Whatnot combines live showcasing with follow-up sale capabilities, thus serving the community in a more novel way than established collectibles market players such as eBay.
The company has grown fast. It was established in 2019 and has already expanded from its original category - Funko Pop figurines - to Pokemon cards, pins, sports cards, and many more. There is still plenty of scope for expanding into new categories, as the company aims to establish itself as the go-to for this large niche, which will be facilitated by the strong levels of funding that Whatnot has raised.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
54% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Jan 2025
$265m
SERIES E
Jul 2022
$260m
SERIES D
Total funding: $749.2m
Company benefits
- Wellness: Health, dental, vision, and life insurance plans. We also cover some of the cost for your dependents as well.
- Compensation: Full-time Whatnauts receive equity, a WFH stipend to support your remote workspace and a monthly stipend to dogfood the app.
- Recharge: Flexible Time Off policy, holiday week off at the end of year, and paid parental leave after 1 year with us.
- Flexibility: Remote-first work culture. We provide a working environment where you're in charge of your time and schedule.
Company HQ
Marina del Rey, CA
Leadership
Grant LaFontaine
(Co-Founder & CEO)Former Product Marketing Manager at Google, Project Manager at Facebook. Also co-founded Kit.
Logan Head
(Co-Founder)Experience in Engineering, including at Maker's Row, Factr, and Flight Club. Former Senior Product Manager at GOAT.
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