Real-Time Safety Engineer — Platform Risk & Defenses

Whatnot; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Whatnot is building the future of live commerce with a remote-enabled, globally distributed team. We are seeking a Software Engineer to design and maintain protective systems that safeguard buyers and sellers while enabling rapid product evolution.

You will own diverse problems across platforms, collaborating with leadership to deliver practical, scalable protections and performance improvements. A strong data-driven mindset is essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
• Data-driven mindset enabling critical thinking about growth headwinds and abuse prevention systems.
• Ambition to move fast without sacrificing quality; focus on delivering value for users.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop systems to protect the platform: build production algorithms and infrastructures that mitigate systemic risks for buyers, sellers, and the Whatnot community.
• Balance risk and user experience: monitor impact of protective systems on trusted users, minimizing friction while adding value.
• Respond in real time to threats: architect event-driven pipelines and detection frameworks for near real-time responses to high-risk behavior.
• Contribute across the full development lifecycle: ideation, scoping, prototyping, load testing, deployment, and monitoring of resilient solutions.
• Drive cross-team initiatives: collaborate across product surfaces and operational teams, surface insights to leadership via dashboards and documentation.
• Continuously evolve defenses: stay ahead of abuse patterns and adapt defenses quickly and rigorously.

Skills

4+ years software engineering

Data-driven mindset

Autonomy

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Dagster

Job description

Whatnot is building the future of live commerce with a remote-enabled, globally distributed team. We are seeking a Software Engineer to design and maintain protective systems that safeguard buyers and sellers while enabling rapid product evolution.

You will own diverse problems across platforms, collaborating with leadership to deliver practical, scalable protections and performance improvements. A strong data-driven mindset is essential.