Software Engineer, Whatnot
Platform Engineering
$190-260k
+ Equity
Live stream platform & marketplace for collectibles
Posted today
Live stream platform & marketplace for collectibles
501-1000 employees
Posted today
$190-260k
+ Equity
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
- 7+ years of backend engineering experience (10+ for Staff-level)
- Strong experience with large-scale backend systems, ideally Python, but experience in other stacks (Java, Go, Elixir, etc.) welcome
- Deep expertise with storage systems (Postgres, DynamoDB, Planetscale)
- Proven experience building or scaling messaging, notification, or caching systems
- Background in refactoring large codebases for scale, performance, and maintainability
- Hands-on with runtime and platform optimization such as concurrency models, async patterns, and memory tuning
- Familiarity with service reliability and observability practices such as metrics, tracing, circuit breakers, and failure isolation
- Comfortable operating in a cloud-native environment such as AWS or GCP with Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform
- Known for setting strong technical standards and for building patterns that other engineers adopt
- Bonus: prior experience in a hyper-growth environment
What the job involves
- Platform Engineers at Whatnot own the foundations of our main backends, real-time services, and storage systems
- The team ensures these core platforms evolve to support rapid product growth while remaining reliable and scalable
- This role is focused on our Python-based main backend and our storage platforms
- You will help scale and optimize the runtime, refactor and modularize our codebases, improve storage systems, and build shared platform services and components that underpin the product experience
- Evolving our Python runtime and stack by improving performance, concurrency, memory use, and dependency management
- Building and scaling core platform services that provide the foundation for reliability, scalability, and developer velocity across engineering
- Optimizing storage systems for consistency, scale, and performance
- Embedding observability and reliability patterns into the platform by default
- Refactoring and modularizing large-scale codebases to maintain developer velocity and ensure our primary codebases remain a productive environment at scale
- Partnering with product and infra teams to deliver platform APIs and abstractions that strike the right balance between velocity and long-term stability
- Laying the groundwork for future platform needs, from global expansion to enabling new product capabilities
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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