Head of European and UK Policy

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.

We are looking for an experienced platform policy leader to shape and evolve Whatnot’s global policies and frameworks across trust and safety, marketplace integrity, and commerce, with a focus on Europe. You will help define how Whatnot protects buyers, supports sellers, and scales responsibly by designing policies that are clear, principled, and built to last.
This role is a great fit if you are a builder who is comfortable operating in ambiguity and sees grey space as an opportunity to define clear direction. You are energized by novel problems without established playbooks or industry norms, and motivated to shape how complex trade-offs are approached. You enjoy influencing outcomes through thoughtful reasoning and steady judgment.

As Head of European and UK Policy, you’ll:

• Author and evolve global policies and frameworks across commerce, buyer and seller protections, fraud, and trust and safety. Draw clear, principled boundaries in complex or ambiguous areas to strengthen consistency and durability as the platform scales. Ensure policy design, operational enforcement, and user-facing guidance remain tightly aligned.

• Leverage data, trend analysis, and structured problem solving to identify emerging risks, pressure-test policy proposals, and evaluate downstream operational impact.

• Apply a European lens to global policy development by tracking emerging trends and evolving user expectations, proactively strengthening frameworks to reflect cultural nuance and reinforce clarity and trust.

• Resolve escalated or unclear policy questions, providing principled recommendations and framing trade-offs for cross-functional and senior stakeholders.

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 Dublin, Ireland hub, London, UK hub or Berlin, Germany hub. Periodic travels to the U.S. will be required.

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 head of Europe and UK Policy, you should have meaningful leadership experience shaping trust and safety, marketplace, or platform governance policy and frameworks at a technology or ecommerce company, plus:

• Strong policy judgment and comfort operating in ambiguous or fast-evolving environments

• 7+ years of experience working across multiple regions or markets where consistency and local nuance must be balanced

• Fluency in modern AI tools, including large language models, with experience using them thoughtfully to improve policy development, analysis, and operational leverage.

• Strong communication skills, including the ability to articulate policy rationale and tradeoffs clearly

• A structured, systems-oriented approach to reducing ambiguity and improving governance clarity

• 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.

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.