Engineering Manager, Orders Platform

Socket.dev; New York (NY); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous Holiday and Time off Policy

Health Insurance options

Work From Home Support

Care benefits

Retirement: 401k with employer match

Monthly allowance to dogfood the app

Parental Leave

Job summary

Whatnot seeks an experienced engineering leader to oversee their global Orders Platform, ensuring seamless operations and exceptional customer experiences. This role is pivotal for managing order lifecycles and collaborating with cross-functional teams, focusing on reliability and technical excellence.

The ideal candidate should have strong backend engineering experience, leadership skills, and a commitment to operational excellence. Join us and help shape the future of commerce!

Qualifications

• Strong experience in backend or platform engineering.
• Experience managing engineering teams in fast-moving environments.
• A track record operating high-scale systems.
• Experience with complex order and workflow-heavy systems.
• The ability to set clear direction and keep a team focused.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for global orders.
• Own operations for the global Orders Platform.
• Partner with senior engineers on technical direction.
• Drive reliability and scale across the architecture.
• Ensure amazing customer experiences.

Skills

Backend or platform engineering experience

Managing engineering teams

High-scale systems operation

Experience with order or workflow-heavy systems

Strong technical judgment

High bar for engineering and operational excellence

Strong communication and leadership skills

Experience hiring and developing engineers

Tools

Python

Elixir

Go

Job description

Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.

As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.

We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. 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

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for systems that support hundreds of millions of orders globally, from creation through post-fulfillment.
• Own building and operations for our global Orders Platform, a business‑critical area at the center of buyer, seller, and internal operational workflows. Own the core order lifecycle across live and async channels, ensuring orders can be created, completed, and recovered reliably.
• Partner with senior engineers across Payments, Marketplace and Fraud teams on technical direction, staying close enough to challenge designs, make trade‑offs, and keep the team focused on the right architecture.
• Drive reliability and scale across the architecture.
• Ensure customer experiences are amazing and helpful - and maintain a high bar for correctness in recovery, refunds, cancellations, and terminal‑state handling.
• Partner closely with CX, Seller, Marketing, Finance, Tax, and admin surface owners on the internal tooling and workflows that depend on Orders Platform.
• Maintain strong operating mechanisms for the team: planning, execution visibility, on‑call, incident response, rollout discipline, and accountability for production behavior.

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 the New York City hub.

You

• Strong experience in backend or platform engineering, along with experience managing engineering teams in fast‑moving environments.
• A track record operating high‑scale systems where reliability, correctness, and user trust matter.
• Experience with complex order, transaction, or workflow‑heavy systems, including state machines, asynchronous processing, or distributed jobs.
• Strong technical judgment. You should be able to challenge designs, understand failure modes, and guide good engineering trade‑offs.
• A high bar for engineering and operational excellence, with deep care for safe execution, observability, ownership, and production quality.
• The ability to set clear direction, translate business needs into focused priorities, and keep a team executing through ambiguity.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, CX, finance, seller‑facing teams, and operations.
• Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers while building a transparent, accountable, and collaborative team culture.
• Comfort operating at the intersection of customer experience, internal operations, and financial correctness.
• Whatnot's backend runs on Python and Elixir, with Go used for performance‑sensitive components. Direct experience with any of these is a plus; equally strong candidates from other modern backend stacks who are eager to learn are welcome.

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 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.