Software Engineer, Whatnot
Discovery Feed & Browse
$175-265k
+ Equity
Live stream platform & marketplace for collectibles
Open for applications
Live stream platform & marketplace for collectibles
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$175-265k
+ 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
- You should excel at making the right tradeoffs between building it fast and building it right
- Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here
- As our next Software Engineer, Machine Learning you should have 5+ years of experience, plus:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience
- Industry experience with a track record of applying practical methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data
- Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams. You can mentor others and prioritize building inclusive, supportive teams
- Experience in machine learning fields (e.g. Recommendations, Content Understanding and Search)
- Expert at designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems
- Firm grasp of visualization tools for monitoring and logging e.g. DataDog, Grafana
- Familiarity with cloud computing platforms and managed services such as AWS Sagemaker, Lambda, Kinesis, S3, EC2, EKS/ECS, Kafka, Flink/Spark
What the job involves
- We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members of our Discovery Feed & Browse team
- You will partner across the company and use data to design scalable solutions based on a deep understanding of critical business goals
- The ideal candidate will support initiatives end to end with software, data & machine learning engineering
- We are looking for a backend engineer with a track record of shipping product features at scale
- We’ll often prototype new ideas quickly, and then need to build them for extreme scale while coordinating closely with other teams - the ideal person for this role is an expert at both of these approaches
- Ship recommendation algorithms and product features to deliver high-quality Discovery experiences for users
- Build and maintain a scalable, stable, low latency feed and browse experience
- Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommendation systems solutions for real-time, dynamic feeds
- Partner closely across the machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to train models to solve product problems and productionize data science and machine learning artifacts
- Contribute scalable solutions across various serving stacks at the feed, search, machine learning service, and Discovery application layers
- Define and advance our technical approach to scalable recommendation 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
Some candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
54% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Employee endorsements
Hard working team
"Everyone here puts in the work. It's refreshing to work on a team where everyone is carrying their weight and lifting each other up. The work ethic..."
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jul 2022
$260m
SERIES D
Sep 2021
$150m
SERIES C
Total funding: $484.2m
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 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 nice
Company HQ
Marina del Rey, 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)Experience in Engineering, including at Maker's Row, Factr, and Flight Club. Former Senior Product Manager at GOAT.
Salary benchmarks
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