Software Engineer, Data

About Whatnot

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.

As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.

We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

Role

The Data team at Whatnot creates services that improve our core product experience and unlock business value. As an engineer, you will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and leading the development of the retrieval platform to power next-gen systems at Whatnot. You will be responsible for driving innovation, ensuring the scalability and performance of our systems, and working with a team of engineers to deliver high-quality solutions.

Working in a highly cross-functional role, you’ll also make key decisions about how we integrate data systems at Whatnot – and then make it happen. You’ll be positioned to align efforts to optimize other aspects of our company’s architecture, such as machine learning, real-time analytics, stream processing, and content understanding to name a few.

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco hubs.

You

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 Software Engineer of Data, you should have 3+ years of experience, plus:

• Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production.
• Track record of building scalable and performant distributed systems.
• Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) for processing and serving data products.
• Expertise in streaming data systems such as Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar, and the ability to design and manage real-time processing pipelines at scale.
• Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management.

In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:

• Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (e.g. Terraform).
• Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles.
• Self-starter ethic, thriving under a high level of autonomy.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.

Compensation

For Full-Time (Salary) US based applicants: $230,000/year to $290,000/year + benefits + equity.

The salary range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills, and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary, not benefits (more details below) or equity.

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
• All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
• Parental Leave
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

EOE

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.

Key skills/competency

• Data Engineering
• Distributed Systems
• Cloud Data Stores
• Streaming Data Systems
• Scalability and Performance
• API Development
• Infrastructure as Code
• Python
• Monitoring and Alerting
• Problem-Solving