Software Engineer, Whatnot
Platform Engineering
$190-260k
+ Equity
Live stream platform & marketplace
Open for applications
Live stream platform & marketplace
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$190-260k
+ Equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
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
- This is a highly visible role: the platform team provides the technical foundation that allows Whatnot to scale rapidly while remaining reliable
Our take
The collectable 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 collectable toys, some of which are rare and can cost thousands of dollars. It's also expanded to sports cards, coins, comics and more.
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
Glassdoor (4.9)
Trustpilot (4.3)
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
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
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 45 more jobs at Whatnot