Engineering Manager, Whatnot
Seller Scaling
$215-245k
+ Equity
Live stream platform & marketplace
Job no longer available
Live stream platform & marketplace
501-1000 employees
Job no longer available
$215-245k
+ 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
- Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, or New York City hubs
- Have experience leading a team of engineers to deliver significant business impact while guiding them through both their career development and executing in a high-growth environment
- Have low ego, an appetite to build, and employ good judgment in making hard trade-offs with limited resources
- Know how to effectively recruit, mentor, retain, and measure high performing teams
- Operate as a technical leader with hands-on experience in large distributed systems and complex user interfaces across web and mobile
- Have great taste in building user experiences and the systems behind them, understand how form follows function, and effectively direct teams to build in this manner
- Be comfortable with technical debt and how to leverage it
- Understand how to instrument product metrics, recognizing the value and limits of data
- Effectively manage stakeholders, competing priorities and deal with ambiguity
- Have substantial hands-on experience of doing the job you’ll be managing
What the job involves
- The Seller Scaling team at Whatnot is responsible for building tools and experiences that empower our top GMV-generating sellers to grow and scale their businesses
- In this role, you’ll help shape strategy, drive execution, and partner closely with product and design to solve complex, high-leverage problems
- We're looking for a leader with strong product instincts, who can clearly articulate what needs to be built — and isn’t afraid to step into a PM mindset when needed
- This will be a highly technical role, requiring strong engineering judgment to guide the team and ensure they have the skills and direction needed to shape and deliver the right solutions
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.
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