Software Engineer, Search and Discovery Platform

Whatnot is the largest livestream 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, Ireland, Poland, and Germany, we’re building the future of online marketplaces—together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to rare 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 intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members in shaping the Discovery Platform. You will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and designing a world-class scalable Discovery system that is scalable enough to keep pace with our business growth to power feed, browse, search and taxonomy systems while catering to the unique challenges of operating a marketplace for live shopping! 

Working in a highly cross functional role, you’ll make key decisions about how we integrate retrieval, ranking through machine learning, real-time and stream processing, content understanding, materialization into a highly personalized discovery experience that unlocks product iterations while providing strong reliability. 

An ideal candidate will have experience building discovery backend and data systems at scale, with a knack for working closely with product engineers to solve immediate problems for our users while making right tradeoffs towards building a platform. We’ll often prototype new ideas quickly, and then need to build them for extreme scale while coordinating closely with other teams - the ideal person for this role is an expert at both of these approaches. 

Learn more about the Discovery systems at Whatnot from our blog posts on Whatamix, LLMs for Search.

 What you'll do:

• Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommendation systems solutions for real-time, dynamic feeds

• Build a scalable, stable, low latency discovery experience

• 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.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York hubs. 

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

As our next Software Engineer you should have 5+ years of experience, a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience, and ideally deep experience with several of the following:

• Industry experience in building and scaling a platform to handle high volume / throughput applications 

• 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 machine learning fields (e.g. Recommendations, Content Understanding and Search).

• 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, OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, Lucene, SOLR.

• Experience with concurrent programming patterns across distributed systems (AsyncIO python preferred), and optimizations / profiling / observability associated with them. 

• Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (e.g. Terraform).

In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:

• Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles.

• Self-starter ethic, thriving under a high level of autonomy.

• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.

• 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 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.