Engineering Manager, Orders Platform

Apply; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous Holiday and Time off Policy

Health Insurance options

Home office setup allowance

Monthly wellness allowance

401k with employer match

16 weeks of paid parental leave

Job summary

Apply is seeking a skilled leader to manage a team of engineers responsible for the global Orders Platform. This role involves ensuring reliability, operational excellence, and effective collaboration across several teams including Payments and Marketing.

Ideal candidates will have a strong background in backend engineering with experience operating high-scale systems. Benefits include generous time off, health insurance, work from home support, and 401k matching.

Qualifications

• Strong experience in backend or platform engineering.
• A track record operating high-scale, reliable systems.
• Experience with complex order or workflow-heavy systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of engineers supporting a global Orders Platform.
• Drive reliability and scale across system architecture.
• Foster partnerships across multiple teams for technical direction.

Skills

Backend or platform engineering experience

Managing engineering teams

Operating high-scale systems

Experience with complex order systems

Strong technical judgment

High bar for operational excellence

Clear direction and prioritization skills

Strong communication skills

Experience hiring and retaining engineers

Comfort with customer experience and operations

Tools

Python

Elixir

Go

Job description

Role

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

In addition to embodying our cultural principles, great candidates will also have:

• 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.