Software Engineer, Python Backend Platform

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.

Platform Engineers at Whatnot own the foundations of our main backends, real-time services, and storage systems. The team ensures these core platforms evolve to support rapid product growth while remaining reliable and scalable.

This role is focused on our Python-based main backend and our storage platforms. You will help scale and optimize the runtime, refactor and modularize our codebases, improve storage systems, and build shared platform services and components that underpin the product experience.

You will work on problems like:

• Evolving our Python runtime and stack by improving performance, concurrency, memory use, and dependency management.

• Building and scaling core platform services that provide the foundation for reliability, scalability, and developer velocity across engineering.

• Optimizing storage systems for consistency, scale, and performance.

• Embedding observability and reliability patterns into the platform by default.

• Refactoring and modularizing large-scale codebases to maintain developer velocity and ensure our primary codebases remain a productive environment at scale.

• Partnering with product and infra teams to deliver platform APIs and abstractions that strike the right balance between velocity and long-term stability.

• Laying the groundwork for future platform needs, from global expansion to enabling new product capabilities.

This is a highly visible role: the platform team provides the technical foundation that allows Whatnot to scale rapidly while remaining reliable.
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 San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY, or Seattle, WA hubs.

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience (10+ for Staff-level).

• Strong experience with large-scale backend systems, ideally Python, but experience in other stacks (Java, Go, Elixir, etc.) welcome.

• Deep expertise with storage systems (Postgres, DynamoDB, Planetscale).

• Proven experience building or scaling messaging, notification, or caching systems.

• Background in refactoring large codebases for scale, performance, and maintainability.

• Hands-on with runtime and platform optimization such as concurrency models, async patterns, and memory tuning.

• Familiarity with service reliability and observability practices such as metrics, tracing, circuit breakers, and failure isolation.

• Comfortable operating in a cloud-native environment such as AWS or GCP with Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform.

• Known for setting strong technical standards and for building patterns that other engineers adopt.

• Bonus: prior experience in a hyper-growth environment.
  

• 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.