Senior Backend Engineer — Ads Platform & Scalability

Whatnot; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Whatnot in the U.S. is hiring a Backend Engineer for the Ads team. You will build across the full ads stack, own backend services, and ship high-quality features end to end.

You should have 4+ years of software engineering, strong design and judgment, and a product-minded approach that creates value for buyers and sellers on the platform.

Collaborating with product, design, data, and other engineers, you’ll turn ambiguous problems into clear technical plans and deliver impact quickly at scale.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping backend systems in production environments.
• Strong experience designing, building, and operating scalable, maintainable backend services.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience working in fast-moving, cross-functional product or platform environments.
• Comfort owning ambiguous problem spaces and turning them into clear technical plans and shipped outcomes.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, especially when partnering across engineering, product, design, and data.
• A product-minded approach to engineering — you care not just about whether a system works, but whether it creates value for users and partner teams.

Responsibilities

• Build ads products by working across the full ads stack including bidding & targeting, ranking/auction, serving, campaign management, and seller tooling.
• Build highly scalable ads systems that handle all aspects of running an online advertising system and help sellers differentiate themselves on Whatnot.
• Dig deep into data, logging, and system behavior to reason about performance, correctness, and impact — not just ship features, but understand why they work.
• Understand our buyer and seller experiences and become an expert in helping them effectively scale their business through ads products.

Skills

Backend engineering

System design

Data-driven debugging

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience

Job description

Whatnot in the U.S. is hiring a Backend Engineer for the Ads team. You will build across the full ads stack, own backend services, and ship high-quality features end to end.

You should have 4+ years of software engineering, strong design and judgment, and a product-minded approach that creates value for buyers and sellers on the platform.

Collaborating with product, design, data, and other engineers, you’ll turn ambiguous problems into clear technical plans and deliver impact quickly at scale.