This role is ideal for a mid-to-senior backend engineer (5+ years of experience) who specializes in discovery systems, recommendations, or search. You should ha
Work type: onsite
Location: New York, NY | Los Angeles, CA | Seattle, WA | San Francisco, CA
Salary: $195,000 – $230,000/yr
Type: Full-time
This role is ideal for a mid-to-senior backend engineer (5+ years of experience) who specializes in discovery systems, recommendations, or search. You should have a proven track record of building low-latency, scalable backend infrastructure and the leadership skills to guide workstreams across machine learning and product teams. The compensation is highly competitive, ranging from $195,000 to $230,000. While the company offers a "remote co-located" model with generous work-from-home support and office setup allowances, you must live within commuting distance of their hubs in NYC, LA, Seattle, or San Francisco. The benefits package is exceptionally robust, featuring 16 weeks of parental leave, a 4% 401k match, and unique stipends for food, wellness, and "dogfooding" the app. **You might be a good fit if you:** * Have deep experience with distributed systems and cloud infrastructure like AWS, Kafka, or Spark. * Are passionate about the "Discovery" space—helping users find content through feed optimization and personalization. * Thrive in a fast-paced environment where you must balance "building it fast" with "building it right." * Enjoy mentoring other engineers and leading cross-functional projects autonomously.
## 🚀 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](https://www.whatnot.com/careers) 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](https://a16z.com/marketplace-100/) and were recently named the [#1 Best Startup Employer in America](http://google.com/search?q=%231+forbes+startup+employer&oq=%231+forbes+startup+employer&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg9MgYIAhBFGD0yBggDEEUYQDIGCAQQRRhAMgYIBRBFGEDSAQg1NzM0ajBqMagCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our [news](https://blog.teamwhatnot.com/) and [engineering blogs](https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering) and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
## 💻 Role
We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members of our Discovery Feed & Personalization team. You will partner across the company to lead our Exploration efforts to help new sellers and small categories grow and thrive.
We are looking for a backend engineer with a track record of shipping product features at scale. You should excel at making the right tradeoffs between building it fast and building it right. You should have experience leading and delivering on cross-functional projects, supporting multiple other engineers.
## What you'll do:
## 👋 You
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.
As our next Software Engineer you should have 5+ years of experience, plus:
## 🎁 Benefits
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.