Remote Production Engineer: Real-Time Scale & Reliability

Whatnot; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 207,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible time off

Health insurance

WFH support

Care benefits

401k match

Parental leave

Dogfooding budget

Job summary

Whatnot is hiring a Production Engineer to embed with product, platform, and infrastructure teams. You will hunt anomalies, improve reliability, and own fixes across live video and real-time commerce systems.

The role emphasizes deep debugging, capacity planning, and strong collaboration in a fast-paced, remote-friendly environment. You will work across payments, search, and the bidding path, focusing on reducing toil and driving top-line performance while supporting peak events and critical

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience.
• 6+ years building and debugging production services at scale.
• Software engineer identity with focus on production systems and reliability.
• Strong systems and distributed systems fundamentals: failure modes, saturation, queueing, cascading failures.
• Depth in observability and production debugging; experience in capacity/performance engineering, load testing, incident command, or large migrations.
• Ability to work well embedded across teams and trust-building.
• Fluency across languages and cloud-native environments (AWS/GCP) with Kubernetes and IaC; backend in Python, Elixir, Go.
• Bonus: experience with high-traffic, real-time, event-driven, or live streaming systems.

Responsibilities

• Go deep with the embedded team to improve reliability, performance, and scalability.
• Hunt anomalies across traffic, latency, error, and cost signals and trace root causes.
• Connect signals to business impact and determine what matters for key cohorts.
• Work on risk-prone areas: payments, live video, search, bidding, and security.
• Eliminate scale bottlenecks in production and address systemic issues.
• Prepare for peak events with capacity modeling, load testing, and drills.
• Improve observability to detect the next issue quickly.
• Apply AI to operations for anomaly detection and toil reduction.
• Share on-call with the embedded team and lead incident response.

Skills

Distributed systems

Production engineering

Observability

Incident response

Capacity planning

Python

Elixir

Go

Cloud-native (AWS/GCP)

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Job description

Whatnot is hiring a Production Engineer to embed with product, platform, and infrastructure teams. You will hunt anomalies, improve reliability, and own fixes across live video and real-time commerce systems.

The role emphasizes deep debugging, capacity planning, and strong collaboration in a fast-paced, remote-friendly environment. You will work across payments, search, and the bidding path, focusing on reducing toil and driving top-line performance while supporting peak events and critical