Engineering Manager, Whatnot
Discovery & Search Platform
$245-330k
+ Offers Equity
More information about location
Live stream platform & marketplace
Be an early applicant
Live stream platform & marketplace
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$245-330k
+ Offers Equity
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
Role
Who you are
- An ideal candidate will be a seasoned people leader with experience building discovery backend and data systems at scale, with a knack for working closely with product engineers to solve immediate problems for our users while making right tradeoffs towards building a platform
- 10+ years of experience in discovery engineering engineering or platform engineering leadership roles, with at least 1-2 years of experience managing teams
- Experience in building and scaling retrieval systems, real-time services, ranking and discovery systems
- Strong experience with software engineering best practices, focusing on maintaining high code quality, reducing technical debt, and improving performance at scale
- Proven experience in guiding teams to deliver complex, large-scale systems with an emphasis on reliability and scalability
- A focus on developer velocity and ergonomics, improving engineering practices to increase speed and quality of delivery while managing technical debt
- Exceptional leadership and communication skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate across multiple teams
- Strong technical background, with the ability to make informed decisions on architecture and technology choices
- Experience with cloud computing platforms and managed services such as AWS Sagemaker, Lambda, Kinesis, S3, EC2, EKS/ECS, Kafka, Flink/Spark, OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, Lucene, SOLR
- Experience in machine learning fields (e.g. Recommendations, Content Understanding and Search
What the job involves
- As a senior leader in our Discovery team, you will play a pivotal role in the growth and evolution of the Whatnot marketplace and platform
- You will oversee our Discovery Platform team, working closely across engineers, product and operations teams to build scalable, reliable and performant Discovery systems that meet the needs of Whatnot’s live social marketplace across millions of users
- Working in a highly cross functional role, you’ll make key decisions about how we integrate retrieval, ranking through machine learning, real-time and stream processing, content understanding, materialization into a highly personalized discovery experience that unlocks product iterations while providing strong reliability
- Lead and mentor a team of highly skilled engineers, guiding them through complex technical challenges and helping them achieve personal and professional growth
- Focus on ensuring engineers can work effectively and quickly, building within and leveraging platform services
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to influence product decisions and ensure engineering solutions meet both business and technical needs
- Own the architecture and development of critical platform initiatives that build and scale retrieval, ranking and search for dynamic feeds with low-latency requirements
- Hire, mentor, and grow a diverse, high-performing team, fostering an inclusive team culture
- Build a scalable platform that provides ergonomic access to advanced discovery and search capabilities across the organization
- Partner closely across the machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to accelerate Discovery capabilities to solve for Whanot’s business needs
- Define and advance our technical approach to scalable recommendation 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
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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