Software Engineer, Trust & Risk at whatnot

This role is ideal for a senior-leaning engineer with at least 4 years of experience building scalable consumer products and a background in Trust, Risk, or Fra

Work type: onsite

Location: San Francisco, CA | Los Angeles, CA | New York, NY | Seattle, WA

Salary: $170,000 – $230,000/yr

Type: Full-time

Summary

This role is ideal for a senior-leaning engineer with at least 4 years of experience building scalable consumer products and a background in Trust, Risk, or Fraud. While the listing is categorized as "Mid-level," the requirement for 7+ years of total experience suggests they are looking for a high-autonomy operator who can write production Python and navigate data warehouses like Snowflake. The compensation is highly competitive ($170k - $230k) and comes with an extensive benefits package, including a 4% 401k match and a unique "dogfooding" budget to shop on the platform. While the company operates with a "remote co-located" philosophy, 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...** * Have a strong command of Python and experience building event-driven pipelines for real-time threat detection. * Possess "business intuition"—you understand that aggressive fraud prevention shouldn't ruin the experience for honest users. * Are comfortable working with data tools like Snowflake, dbt, or Dagster to track platform integrity. * Thrive in high-growth environments where you move fast, document your work well, and solve problems with minimal oversight.

Job Description

## 🚀 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

The Trust and Risk, Fraud, and Integrity teams at Whatnot are responsible for building systems that help set clear expectations, encourage good behavior, and address issues fairly and efficiently. By combining proactive detection with transparent enforcement, we ensure Whatnot remains a safe and trustworthy place for both buyers and sellers..

We focus on:

• Policy enforcement and dispute resolution: Designing systems that set clear behavioral expectations, detect and address policy violations, and resolve disputes efficiently.

• Reusable, high-performance platforms: Building and maintaining scalable infrastructure that powers internal operations, automated and manual actioning systems, and advanced detection capabilities.

• Intelligent detection and prevention: Leveraging machine learning, behavioral analysis, and real-time interventions to stay ahead of evolving abuse patterns and protect both buyers and sellers.

• Continuous improvement: Using feedback loops and monitoring systems as managed assets for ongoing quality assurance and for strengthening algorithms, methodologies, and operational processes.

## What you'll do:

• Design and develop systems to protect the platform: Build and iterate on production algorithms and infrastructures that mitigate systemic risks and safeguard buyers, sellers, and the broader Whatnot community.

• Balance risk and user experience: Proactively monitor the impact of protective systems on trusted users, ensuring interventions deliver more value than friction.

• Respond in real time to threats: Architect event-driven pipelines and detection frameworks that enable near real-time responses to high-risk user behavior.

• Contribute across the full development lifecycle: Engage in ideation, scoping, prototyping, load testing, deployment, and monitoring to deliver resilient and scalable solutions.

• Drive cross-team initiatives: Collaborate across multiple product surfaces and operational teams, surfacing insights to leadership and stakeholders through dashboards, notebooks, and clear written documentation.

• Continuously evolve defenses: Stay ahead of emerging abuse patterns, abuse vectors, and account integrity risks by iterating quickly and rigorously testing solutions.

## 👋 You

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here.

As our next Software Engineer you should have 7+ years of total software engineering experience, plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.

• 4+ years of software engineering experience building for consumer-scale loads.

• 1+ years of experience writing production code in Python.

• 1+ years of experience in Trust and Risk or Integrity or Fraud domains preferred.

• Business intuition & a data-driven mindset that enables you to think critically about the growth headwinds abuse prevention systems can create. Explicit data science or machine-learning experience is a huge plus.

• Obsession with impact. You are focused on driving value for users & have a track record of deploying simple solutions wherever feasible. You move as fast as possible without sacrificing quality.

• Relentnessness & entrepreneurship. You prioritize your work ruthlessly & run through walls to get things done. Your curiosity drives you to dig into user problems & craft suggestions on how we can address them.

• Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams.

• Comfortability with data warehouses and transformation tools such as Snowflake, dbt, Dagster.

• Professionalism around collaborating in a remote working environment and well tested reproducible work.

• Above average documentation and communication skills.

• 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.

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