Staff Data Engineer, Whatnot
Data Developer Platform
$207-290k
+Equity
More information about location
Live stream platform & marketplace
Job no longer available
Live stream platform & marketplace
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$207-290k
+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
- People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building
- They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it
- Have a minimum of 7+ years of experience as a data or software engineer building data warehouses, distributed data systems, or event-driven architectures
- Can design and implement data models using dimensional, Data Vault, or ledger-style techniques that support analytical and transactional workloads
- 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
- Are comfortable writing production-grade code in Python or SQL languages, and integrating with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code workflows
- Enjoy partnering across disciplines engineering, product, analytics to translate messy business requirements into elegant data systems
- Thrive as a self-starter in a fast-moving environment, owning both the technical design and the operational outcomes of your work
- If designing the data backbone that powers Whatnot’s growth, insights, and product innovation excites you, we’d love to meet you
What the job involves
- As our newest Data Engineer, you’ll build and scale the systems that power data-driven decisions across the company
- You’ll own the strategy that empowers the Analytics team’s tooling which includes but is not limited to internal reporting, agentic tooling, and experimentation
- Own the analytics data strategy end-to-end. Define how internal reporting, business intelligence, agentic tooling, and experimentation infrastructure are architected, then drive that strategy into production. You'll make the calls on data models, tooling investments, and delivery patterns that balance speed, accuracy, and long-term scalability
- Drive the AI strategy behind our internal tools. Identify where agentic and LLM-powered tooling can supercharge how the business understands itself, then lead the roadmap that turns those bets into reliable, adopted systems — from prompt and data standards to the infrastructure that makes them trustworthy at scale
- Define and own the domain data strategy. Establish the metrics that matter, the underlying data that powers them, and the standards for how they're modeled, named, and used across the org. Set the contracts and ownership boundaries that keep every team building on the same source of truth
- Guarantee consistency, accuracy, and speed in reporting and intelligence. Build the monitoring, testing, and reconciliation systems that make every dashboard and dataset trustworthy — so decision-makers never have to wonder if the number in front of them is right or current
- Translate raw data into business understanding. Partner cross-functionally with analytics, product, engineering, and business stakeholders to turn complex data into clear, actionable insight — shaping not just what data exists, but how the business actually uses it to make decisions
- Set the technical bar for the data organization. Establish best practices for modeling, tooling, and data quality that other engineers and analysts build on, and mentor the broader org toward higher craft as an IC lead — without a management chain, but with organization-wide influence
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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