This role is ideal for a mid-to-senior level backend engineer (5+ years experience) who specializes in the intersection of data infrastructure and discovery sys
Work type: onsite
Location: San Francisco, CA | Los Angeles, CA | New York, NY | Seattle, WA
Salary: $170,000 – $230,000/yr
Type: Full-time
This role is ideal for a mid-to-senior level backend engineer (5+ years experience) who specializes in the intersection of data infrastructure and discovery systems. You should have a proven track record of building high-throughput platforms and a deep understanding of how to translate machine learning models into real-time user experiences like feeds and search. Whatnot offers a highly competitive salary range ($170k–$230k) and a robust benefits package, including a 4% 401(k) match and unique perks like a "dogfooding" budget to shop on the app. While the team is "remote co-located," you must live within commuting distance of their hubs in SF, LA, NYC, or Seattle for in-person collaboration. **You might be a good fit if you...** * Are proficient in **Python** (specifically AsyncIO) and distributed systems. * Have hands-on experience with search and streaming technologies like **OpenSearch, Kafka, or Flink**. * Enjoy the "prototype-to-scale" lifecycle, moving quickly from an idea to a system handling massive traffic. * Want to build the foundational discovery architecture for a rapidly growing social commerce marketplace.
## 🚀 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
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 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:
## 💛 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.