Compensation Lead

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.

And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. 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 a Compensation Lead to join our growing Total Rewards team. In this role, you’ll be a trusted strategic partner to leaders across the business, especially Sales and Marketing. You’ll design fair, competitive pay programs—empowering leaders to make informed decisions and ensuring our people and the company are set up to thrive.

• Act as a strategic partner to RevOps, Finance, and People Business Partners in building and executing compensation frameworks that align with business goals.

• Perform market benchmarking using tools like Radford, Pave, and surveys to recommend job levels, pay ranges, and compensation philosophy.

• Ensure compensation plans are equitable, compliant, and fiscally sound through governance processes, transparent documentation, and risk mitigation.

• Lead execution of semi-annual compensation cycles, partnering with leaders to ensure alignment and accuracy across all teams.

• Own and manage our compensation systems and tools, including our primary platform Complete, to ensure data integrity, accurate reporting, and effective decision-making.

• Partner with People Analytics to analyze and monitor pay outcomes, ensuring transparent, efficient compensation processes and equitable pay across the company.

• Train and enable leaders, managers, and cross-functional partners on compensation design, mechanics, systems, and literacy.

• Analyze compensation program performance, including attainment, payout trends, comp ratios, and forecasted cost vs. performance, and recommend data-driven improvements.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our New York City, NY, or San Francisco, CA hubs.

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 Compensation Lead, you should have 6+ years of hands-on compensation experience at a fast-paced or high growth company, plus:

• Strong expertise in incentive design, job analysis, benchmarking, and compensation philosophies.

• You have a deep understanding of sales and variable compensation structures.

• Proficiency with compensation tools (e.g., Radford, Pave) and strong analytical acumen (advanced Excel/Sheets modeling).

• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills—particularly in translating complex comp topics to non-People leaders.

• Proven track record owning compensation planning cycles and bringing operational discipline and process improvements.

• Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution.

• 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.