Software Engineer, Whatnot
Data Foundations
$200-275k
Live stream platform & marketplace
Posted today
Live stream platform & marketplace
1001+ employees
Posted today
$200-275k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
Role
Who you are
- As our next Software Engineer, Data Platform, you should have 8+ years of experience, plus:
- Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production
- Track record of building scalable, high-performance distributed systems
- Strong experience with streaming data systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar) and/or orchestration platforms (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or Temporal), with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself, not just downstream pipelines
- Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful, real-time data pipelines at scale, including concepts like checkpointing, state management, and watermarking
- Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in data processing and orchestration systems, including when a given tool is the right solution and when it is not
- Experience building multi-tenant or end-to-end data infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases
- Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) and data lake architectures (e.g., AWS S3) for processing and serving data products
- Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management
- Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and CI/CD tooling, including GitHub and GitHub Actions
- Understanding of data governance and compliance principles (e.g., data access controls, retention policies, auditability)
- In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:
- Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (for example, Terraform)
- Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles
- Self-starter ethic, with the ability to thrive under a high level of autonomy
- Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills
What the job involves
- The Data Platform team at Whatnot builds services that improve our core product experience and unlock meaningful business value. In this role, you will:
- Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next-generation capabilities at Whatnot
- Lead the buildout and evolution of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, helping drive them from early platform investment to production-ready usage across the company
- Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant data infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of an existing platform
- Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems
- Build high-quality systems that support real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and machine learning infrastructure needs across Whatnot
- Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and then partner cross-functionally to bring that architecture to life
- Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development
- Help shape broader company architecture across orchestration, stream processing, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding
- Apply DevOps/SRE practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, monitoring, and incident response, to keep platform systems reliable at scale
- Help define and enforce data governance and compliance standards across our data lake and downstream systems
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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