Engineering Manager, Whatnot
Orders Platform
$245-290k
+ Equity
Live stream platform & marketplace
Posted today
Live stream platform & marketplace
1001+ employees
Posted today
$245-290k
+ Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
Role
Who you are
- Strong experience in backend or platform engineering, along with experience managing engineering teams in fast-moving environments
- A track record operating high-scale systems where reliability, correctness, and user trust matter
- Experience with complex order, transaction, or workflow-heavy systems, including state machines, asynchronous processing, or distributed jobs
- Strong technical judgment. You should be able to challenge designs, understand failure modes, and guide good engineering trade-offs
- A high bar for engineering and operational excellence, with deep care for safe execution, observability, ownership, and production quality
- The ability to set clear direction, translate business needs into focused priorities, and keep a team executing through ambiguity
- Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, CX, finance, seller-facing teams, and operations
- Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers while building a transparent, accountable, and collaborative team culture
- Comfort operating at the intersection of customer experience, internal operations, and financial correctness
- Whatnot's backend runs on Python and Elixir, with Go used for performance-sensitive components. Direct experience with any of these is a plus; equally strong candidates from other modern backend stacks who are eager to learn are welcome
What the job involves
- Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for systems that support hundreds of millions of orders globally, from creation through post-fulfillment
- Own building and operations for our global Orders Platform, a business-critical area at the center of buyer, seller, and internal operational workflows. Own the core order lifecycle across live and async channels, ensuring orders can be created, completed, and recovered reliably
- Partner with senior engineers across Payments, Marketplace and Fraud teams on technical direction, staying close enough to challenge designs, make trade-offs, and keep the team focused on the right architecture
- Drive reliability and scale across the architecture
- Ensure customer experiences are amazing and helpful - and maintain a high bar for correctness in recovery, refunds, cancellations, and terminal-state handling
- Partner closely with CX, Seller, Marketing, Finance, Tax, and admin surface owners on the internal tooling and workflows that depend on Orders Platform
- Maintain strong operating mechanisms for the team: planning, execution visibility, on-call, incident response, rollout discipline, and accountability for production behavior
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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