Software Engineer, Discovery (Feed)

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 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.

• Ship product features to deliver high-quality Discovery experiences for users

• Build and maintain a scalable, stable, low latency feed experience

• Build the services and infrastructure to enable efficient exploration systems to help small sellers and new categories grow

• Lead a workstream of multiple other software engineers as the individual responsible for success

• Partner closely across the machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to utilize models to solve discovery problems

• Contribute scalable solutions across various serving stacks at the feed, search, machine learning service, and Discovery application layers.

• Define and advance our technical approach to scalable recommendation systems.

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 New York City, San Francisco, Seattle or Los Angeles hub.

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:

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

• Industry experience with a track record of applying practical methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data.

• Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams. You can mentor others and prioritize building inclusive, supportive teams.

• Experience in discovery-related fields (e.g. Recommendations, Content Understanding, Search, etc.).

• Expert at designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems.

• Firm grasp of visualization tools for monitoring and logging e.g. DataDog, Grafana

• Familiarity with cloud computing platforms and managed services such as AWS Sagemaker, Lambda, Kinesis, S3, EC2, EKS/ECS, Kafka, Flink/Spark.

• Flexible Time off Policy and Company-wide Holidays (including a spring and winter break)

• 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 on both food and 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

• 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.