Data Foundations Engineer — Real-Time Platform

Whatnot; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance options

Work-from-home setup allowance

Monthly phone/internet allowance

Wellness allowance

Childcare and family planning benefits

401k with employer match up to 4% (US)

Pension plans internationally

Dog‑fooding allowance

Parental leave benefits

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking a senior data platform engineer to define technical direction and lead the development of critical data systems powering next‑generation capabilities. You will drive the buildout of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, moving them to production usage company‑wide.

You will own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems, while supporting real‑time analytics and ML infra needs

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building production-grade data platforms.
• Experience with streaming data systems and orchestration platforms.
• Designs scalable, multi-tenant data infrastructure for multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Define technical direction and lead development of data platform systems at Whatnot.
• Build out data orchestration and streaming platforms for production use company-wide.
• Design scalable, multi-tenant data infrastructure beyond pipelines.
• Own platform reliability, performance, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing.
• Build real-time analytics, event-driven apps, and ML infrastructure needs.
• Collaborate with product, platform, ML, and data teams to realize architecture.
• Shape company architecture across orchestration, streaming, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding.
• Apply DevOps/SRE practices including CI/CD, automation, monitoring, and incident response.
• Define and enforce data governance and compliance across data lakes and downstream systems.

Skills

API-driven design

Distributed systems

Streaming data platforms

Cloud data stores

DevOps / SRE practices

CI/CD tooling

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Pulsar

Airflow

Dagster

Temporal

Snowflake

BigQuery

Redshift

AWS S3

GitHub

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

Whatnot is seeking a senior data platform engineer to define technical direction and lead the development of critical data systems powering next‑generation capabilities. You will drive the buildout of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, moving them to production usage company‑wide.

You will own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems, while supporting real‑time analytics and ML infra needs