Director, Logistics Engineering

ZipRecruiter; Los Angeles (CA); Remote; USD 270,000 - 355,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading e-commerce platform is looking for a Director of Logistics Engineering. This role involves setting technical strategies, guiding architecture for scalable logistics systems, and leading a team to enhance shipping solutions. Ideal candidates should have experience in API platform leadership and strong communication skills. Competitive compensation between $270K and $355K is offered, along with generous benefits.

Benefits

Generous Holiday and Time off Policy

Health Insurance options

Work From Home Support

Retirement plan with employer match

Parental Leave

Qualifications

• Experience in leading platform teams providing foundational APIs.
• Strong product sense balanced with user experience considerations.
• Ability to thrive in ambiguous environments and make strategic decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own the platform strategy for logistics engineering.
• Guide architectural decisions for scalable logistics systems.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration to leverage logistics data.

Skills

Technical strategy development

API and platform services leadership

Customer empathy

Strong communication skills

Team scaling and management

Job description

Overview

Job Description Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

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.

Role

The Logistics team at Whatnot focuses on all things shipping for our sellers and buyers globally — including global carrier integrations, providing tools to sellers to ship quickly and efficiently, opening up new lines of business, showing accurate tracking to buyers, and more. Logistics is deeply connected with the foundations of our business and unlock tremendous growth while creating exciting new ways for our users to have the highest quality shipping experience with Whatnot.

As our Director of Logistics Engineering, you will be responsible for setting and executing the technical strategy for one of Whatnot’s most foundational teams. You’ll work in close partnership with product, design, and a wide array of internal stakeholders to build scalable systems and services that power logistics across the platform. You’ll lead a growing engineering team through a period of rapid expansion, and play a key role in shaping how sellers and buyers experience fulfillment, delivery, and everything in between.

In this role, you will:

• Own the long-term platform and product strategy for Logistics engineering, including carrier integrations, internal logistics APIs, and user-facing fulfillment options.
• Guide architectural decisions and technical foundations to support scale, flexibility, and resilience in our global logistics systems.
• Drive cross-functional collaboration with teams like Marketplace, Payments, T&S, Customer Experience, and Finance to support shared use of logistics data and services.
• Develop foundational infrastructure for a broad range of fulfillment options — from local pickup to freight — while ensuring optionality and configurability for sellers.
• Build internal logistics services that operate like an internal SaaS platform — exposing clean APIs and generating margin via handling fees and label sales.
• Lead initiatives to dramatically reduce time-to-integration for new shipping carriers, both domestic and international.
• Provide accurate, robust reporting infrastructure used by business teams to assess margins, financial health, and service reliability.
• Stay hands-on in system design and technical decision-making while empowering engineers to take ownership and grow.
• Foster a culture of high technical rigor, customer-first thinking, and continuous improvement.

This role is required to be within commuting distance of our San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, or New York City hub.

Qualifications

• Be able to drive technical strategy while staying close enough to the details to meaningfully mentor and develop engineers across experience levels.
• Have experience leading platform teams that provide foundational APIs and services used by multiple product and business teams.
• Demonstrate strong product sense and customer empathy, especially in balancing internal platform needs with external user experience.
• Thrive in ambiguity, with the ability to identify core architectural investments and execute against long-term roadmaps without perfect specs.
• Communicate with clarity and influence across engineering, product, and business teams — aligning technical direction with company goals.
• Show an eagerness to grow and scale a team, with experience hiring, mentoring, and setting up strong engineering management practices.
• Move fluidly between high-level strategy and in-the-weeds problem-solving — this is not a “pure people manager” role.
• Exhibit a bias for action and pragmatism when making build-vs-buy decisions, especially in platform or integration-heavy environments.
• Embrace the mindset of a builder — someone who chose to lead in order to scale their impact through others, not just to manage process.

Benefits

• 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.

EOE

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value , and we do not discriminate on the basis of , , , , , , , marital status, veteran status, parental status, 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.

Compensation Range: $270K - $355K