Staff Production Engineer, Whatnot
$245-290k
Live stream platform & marketplace
Posted today
Live stream platform & marketplace
1001+ employees
Posted today
$245-290k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
Role
Who you are
- People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
- 9+ years building and debugging production services at scale. You may have come to that through software engineering, production engineering, SRE, or systems engineering; what matters is the depth, not the title
- A software engineer's identity first, paired with a pull toward the messy end of production. You want to write code and build systems, and you're the one who notices the graph that looks slightly wrong and can't let it go
- Strong systems and distributed systems fundamentals: failure modes, saturation, queueing behavior, cascading failure, and how Linux, networking, and storage behave under load
- Depth in observability and production debugging, plus experience in one or more of: capacity and performance engineering, load and resilience testing, incident command, or large-scale migrations under production constraints
- The ability to work well embedded. You can walk into another team's codebase, earn trust quickly, and leave the system better than you found it
- Fluency across languages and technologies, and comfort in cloud-native environments such as AWS or GCP with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code. Our backend is primarily Python and Elixir, with Go for performance-sensitive infrastructure, and we care more about depth and adaptability than a specific stack
- Bonus: high-traffic, real-time, event-driven, or live streaming systems
What the job involves
- Production Engineers are software engineers who embed with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to find and fix what breaks at scale. We think of them as hunters: engineers who go looking for the anomaly, the bottleneck, the slow degradation nobody has noticed yet, and then own it through to a fix, working with whoever owns the system to make sure it stays fixed
- Live video and real-time commerce run on the same critical path here. Every auction is live and money moves during the show, so system behavior and business outcomes are tightly coupled in a way few platforms experience
- Milliseconds are visible to buyers and sellers, and the signals that matter most are often small, concentrated in a specific cohort, and invisible in aggregate. Surfacing them early, and knowing which ones are worth acting on, is the core of this work
- Production Engineers embed with a team and go deep on its systems, while staying accountable for what falls between teams. Some of the most consequential problems at our scale live in the seams, in the interaction between two services that each look healthy on their own, so we expect hunting both inside your area and across it
- You'll be joining early, which means broader discovery across the platform before the embedding settles, and real influence over how Production Engineering takes shape here
- Go deep with the team you embed with, raising the reliability, performance, and scalability of their systems alongside them and writing the code that gets it there
- Hunt anomalies across traffic, latency, error, and cost signals, both inside your area and in the seams between teams, and trace them to root cause across services, storage, and clients
- Connect operational signals to business impact: which degradations matter, for which cohorts, and which are safe to leave alone
- Work where the risk concentrates: payments, live video, search, the bidding path, and security
- Eliminate scale bottlenecks in production, then remove the class of problem rather than the instance
- Prepare for peak events through capacity modeling, load testing, and failure drills
- Improve observability where it's thin, so the next anomaly is found in minutes rather than quarters
- Put AI to work on operations: anomaly detection, on-call assistance, remediation, toil reduction. Mostly greenfield, and yours to prove out
- Share on-call with the team you embed with, and act as an escalation point for live production incidents
- Lead incident response for complex cross-team failures and drive the systemic fixes that follow
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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