Software Engineer, Whatnot
Search & Discovery Platform
$170-230k
+ Equity
More information about location
Live stream platform & marketplace
Open for applications
Live stream platform & marketplace
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$170-230k
+ 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 have 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
- Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high-impact drive goes a long way here
- As our next Software Engineer you should have 5+ years of experience, a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience, and ideally deep experience with several of the following:
- Industry experience in building and scaling a platform to handle high volume / throughput applications
- 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, OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, Lucene, SOLR
- Experience with concurrent programming patterns across distributed systems (AsyncIO python preferred), and optimizations / profiling / observability associated with them
- Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (e.g. Terraform)
- In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:
- Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles
- Self-starter ethic, thriving under a high level of autonomy
- Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills
What the job involves
- We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members in shaping the Discovery Platform
- You will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and designing a world-class scalable Discovery system that is scalable enough to keep pace with our business growth to power feed, browse, search and taxonomy systems while catering to the unique challenges of operating a marketplace for live shopping!
- 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
- 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
- Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommendation systems solutions for real-time, dynamic feeds
- Build a scalable, stable, low latency discovery experience
- Partner closely across the machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to utilize models to solve discovery problems
- 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
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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