This role is designed for a senior-level backend engineer (5+ years of experience) who specializes in the infrastructure behind discovery and recommendation eng
Work type: remote
Location: San Francisco, CA | Los Angeles, CA | New York, NY | Seattle, WA
Salary: $170,000 – $230,000/yr
Type: Full-time
This role is designed for a senior-level backend engineer (5+ years of experience) who specializes in the infrastructure behind discovery and recommendation engines. The ideal candidate has a deep understanding of high-throughput distributed systems and moving data at scale. You should be comfortable bridging the gap between platform engineering and machine learning, particularly in the context of real-time search and personalized feeds. The compensation is highly competitive ($170k–$230k) for a mid-to-senior level position. While the role is remote-friendly, it follows a "remote co-located" model, meaning you must live within commuting distance of hubs in SF, LA, NYC, or Seattle for occasional in-person collaboration. Notable perks include a 4% 401k match, a "dogfooding" budget to shop on the platform, and comprehensive family planning benefits. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Have extensive experience with Python (AsyncIO) and managing cloud infrastructure via Terraform/AWS. * Have built or maintained search and discovery stacks using tools like OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, or Kafka. * Enjoy the "prototype-to-production" lifecycle—moving fast to test ideas but building for extreme scale once proven. * Want to work on unique marketplace challenges like real-time auction discovery and spirit-of-the-moment personalization.
## 🚀 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 in shaping the Discovery Platform. You will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and designing a world-class scalable Discovery system that is scalable enough to keep pace with our business growth to power feed, browse, search and taxonomy systems while catering to the unique challenges of operating a marketplace for live shopping!
Working in a highly cross functional role, you’ll make key decisions about how we integrate retrieval, ranking through machine learning, real-time and stream processing, content understanding, materialization into a highly personalized discovery experience that unlocks product iterations while providing strong reliability.
An ideal candidate will have experience building discovery backend and data systems at scale, with a knack for working closely with product engineers to solve immediate problems for our users while making right tradeoffs towards building a platform. We’ll often prototype new ideas quickly, and then need to build them for extreme scale while coordinating closely with other teams - the ideal person for this role is an expert at both of these approaches.
Learn more about the Discovery systems at Whatnot from our blog posts on [Whatamix](https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering/whatamix-blendable-feed-construction-2c94c21f6635), [LLMs for Search](https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering/enhancing-search-using-large-language-models-f9dcb988bdb9).
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, a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience, and ideally deep experience with several of the following:
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.