Engineering Manager, Core Backend Services

Role Overview

As a senior leader in our Infrastructure team at Whatnot, you will play a pivotal role in the growth and evolution of Whatnot’s platform. You will oversee our Platform Engineering team, working closely with engineering, product, and operations teams to build scalable, reliable, and performant systems that will support millions of users as we continue to scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of highly skilled engineers, guiding them through complex technical challenges and helping them achieve personal and professional growth.
• Develop and implement strategic roadmaps for platform engineering that align with company objectives, ensuring scalability and supporting developer velocity.
• Focus on ensuring engineers can work effectively and quickly, building within and leveraging our platform services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to influence product decisions and ensure engineering solutions meet both business and technical needs.
• Drive best practices in software engineering, with a focus on reducing technical debt, improving code quality, and continuously evolving engineering practices to enable faster delivery.
• Own the architecture and development of critical infrastructure initiatives, including backend services, real-time systems, and storage infrastructure.
• Foster a culture of innovation and continuous learning, encouraging experimentation and the adoption of new technologies.
• Monitor industry trends, ensuring that Whatnot remains at the cutting edge of platform and infrastructure technology.
• Scale the team through hiring, mentorship, and leadership development initiatives.

Who You Are

In addition to embodying our cultural principles, great candidates will also have:

• 10+ years of experience in platform engineering or infrastructure engineering leadership roles, with at least 5 years of experience managing teams.
• Experience in building and scaling backend systems, real-time services, and storage infrastructure.
• Strong experience with software engineering best practices, focusing on maintaining high code quality, reducing technical debt, and improving performance at scale.
• Proven experience in guiding teams to deliver complex, large-scale systems with an emphasis on reliability and scalability.
• A focus on developer velocity and ergonomics, improving engineering practices to increase speed and quality of delivery while managing technical debt.
• Exceptional leadership and communication skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate across multiple teams.
• Strong technical background, with the ability to make informed decisions on architecture and technology choices.
• A passion for building and improving technology platforms that scale efficiently.

Benefits

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home Support
• Home office setup allowance
• Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits
• Monthly allowance for wellness
• Annual allowance towards Childcare
• Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
• Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
• Parental Leave: 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work

Key skills/competency

• Scalable Systems
• Backend Services
• Real-time Systems
• Storage Infrastructure
• Technical Leadership
• Software Engineering Best Practices
• Developer Velocity
• System Architecture
• Mentorship
• Infrastructure Engineering