Data Software Engineer, Whatnot
Notifications
$180-260k
+ Equity
Live stream platform & marketplace
Be an early applicant
Live stream platform & marketplace
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$180-260k
+ 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
- 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 L5 Data Engineer, you bring deep experience designing reliable, scalable data systems and are excited to take true ownership of a complex product domain
- You should have 5+ years of experience in the data or software engineering domain, plus:
- Strong experience building and maintaining production-grade data pipelines with clear SLAs, monitoring, and alerting
- Deep expertise in SQL, including complex model graphs, dependency management, and performance optimization
- Are comfortable writing production-grade code in Python or SQL languages, and integrating with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code workflows
- Have deep hands-on expertise with modern data tooling across ingestion (e.g., Kafka, Debezium), transformation (dbt, Spark, Flink), orchestration (Dagster, Airflow), and observability (Monte Carlo, Great Expectations)
- Have operated cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift, including schema design, cost optimization, and workload tuning
- Proven track record working with large-scale datasets (hundreds of millions of rows per day)
- Experience designing data models that balance analytics, ML, and operational debugging use cases
- Strong systems thinking — you consider correctness, latency, cost, and maintainability together
- Self-starter ethic, thriving under a high level of autonomy
- Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills in cross-functional environments
What the job involves
- At Whatnot data engineers build foundational data systems that power product development, experimentation, machine learning, and operational decision-making across the company
- As an L5 Data Engineer on the Notifications Platform, you will play a critical role in owning and evolving one of the highest-volume and highest-impact data domains at Whatnot
- Notifications generate hundreds of millions of events per day, and the underlying data systems support everything from ML iteration and experimentation to adhoc engineering debugging
- In this role, you will define the technical direction for the Notifications data mart, harden it to production-grade reliability, and set new patterns for domain-owned data engineering
- Working in a highly cross-functional role, you will collaborate closely with Product Engineers, Data Scientists, ML Engineers, and the Analytics Platform team
- You’ll make key architectural decisions around data modeling, reliability, latency, and cost — and then make them real
- Own data architecture end-to-end. Define how we capture, model, and serve critical business data—then implement it in production. You’ll make architectural decisions around storage formats, compute patterns, and SLAs that balance cost, scalability, and consistency
- Build mission-critical pipelines. Develop and operate batch data workflows that process high-volume events related to notifications with tight guarantees for latency, completeness, and accuracy
- Design and implement canonical models. Create domain-oriented data models that serve as the source of truth for analytics, ML, and production applications. Establish and enforce modeling standards, ownership boundaries, and data contracts across teams
- Enforce data quality at scale. Build tests, lineage, monitoring, and reconciliation systems that make every dataset observable and every anomaly actionable
- Automate operational workflows. Partner with business systems and platform teams to eliminate manual data handoffs and reconcile data across services, warehouses, and external systems
- Enable insights and experimentation. Support analytics, ML, and product engineering teams by exposing high-quality, self-healing, maintainable data assets
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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