Senior Data Foundations Engineer (Real-Time) — Remote

Whatnot; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Work-from-home support

Retirement 401k and pension plans

Parental leave: 16 weeks

Dog‑friendly app monthly allowance

Home office setup allowance

Cellphone and internet allowance

Monthly wellness allowance

Childcare allowance

Lifetime family planning benefit

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking a Software Engineer, Data Foundations to define the technical direction of data platform systems and lead the evolution of our real‑time analytics stack. You will own scalability, reliability, and production readiness for data pipelines that power live commerce experiences.

You will collaborate across product, platform, ML, and data teams to implement multi‑tenant data infrastructure, governance, and automated CI/CD processes, driving operational excellence at scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building scalable, high‑performance distributed systems.
• Experience with streaming data systems (Kafka, Flink, Pulsar) and orchestration platforms (Airflow, Dagster, Temporal).
• Hands‑on experience designing and operating real‑time data pipelines at scale.
• Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in data processing and orchestration systems.
• Experience building multi‑tenant data infrastructure for multiple teams.
• Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and data lake architectures (AWS S3).
• Strong experience with monitoring, incident management, and CI/CD tooling (GitHub Actions).
• Understanding of data governance and compliance principles.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical direction and lead development of data platform systems.
• Evolve data orchestration and streaming platforms to production‑grade usage.
• Design scalable, multi‑tenant data infrastructure and ensure reliability at scale.
• Own platform concerns like scalability, performance, and SLOs for data processing.
• Build systems supporting real‑time analytics, event‑driven apps, and ML infrastructure.
• Collaborate with product, platform, ML, and data teams to enable safe development.
• Apply DevOps/SRE practices to maintain reliability and automation.
• Shape company architecture around orchestration and analytics.

Skills

Distributed systems

Streaming data systems

Data orchestration

Real-time analytics

DevOps/SRE practices

CI/CD tooling

GitHub Actions

Multi-tenant data infra

Cloud data stores

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Pulsar

Airflow

Dagster

Temporal

Snowflake

BigQuery

Redshift

AWS S3

Job description

Whatnot is seeking a Software Engineer, Data Foundations to define the technical direction of data platform systems and lead the evolution of our real‑time analytics stack. You will own scalability, reliability, and production readiness for data pipelines that power live commerce experiences.

You will collaborate across product, platform, ML, and data teams to implement multi‑tenant data infrastructure, governance, and automated CI/CD processes, driving operational excellence at scale.