Senior Staff Software Engineer

Whatnot Inc.; California; Remote; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Whatnot is hiring Senior Staff Engineers who will operate across the company to shape scalable, high‑reliability systems. You will drive cross‑org impact, set technical direction, and mentor teams while maintaining deep context across domains.

You should have 10+ years of software engineering experience with a proven record of cross‑org influence, strong technical judgment, and hands‑on capability to guide complex initiatives in a consumer‑scale environment. Remote/hub presence is supported.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of software engineering experience with cross-org leadership at consumer scale.
• Strong technical judgment: challenge designs, identify failure modes, and trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Drive cross-org technical impact by creating capabilities that don’t yet exist and be measured by company-level metrics.
• Establish technical direction across org boundaries via strategy docs, RFCs, and architecture reviews.
• Spot systemic risks and opportunities across domains by staying close to the business.
• Build patterns and frameworks that become engineering defaults and accelerate others without compromising quality.
• Steward the health of multiple systems and guide their long-term evolution with balance between pragmatism and architectural integrity.
• Shape engineering culture and mentor teams through collaboration, speaking, and program development.

Skills

Cross-org leadership

Technical judgement

Cross-functional collaboration

Deliver complex initiatives

Consumer-scale experience

Mentorship

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.

As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.

We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

Role

This is not a role we open often. Senior Staff Engineers at Whatnot operate at cross-org scope - their influence and accountability extend across organizational boundaries, and the systems and patterns they create become the foundation others build on for years. We're selectively having conversations with a small number of Senior Staff Engineers, not tied to a specific team or problem, but to the caliber of person. Where you plug in will be a function of what you bring and what problems excite you most.

• Drive cross-org technical impact by creating capabilities that don't yet exist, measured by movement in company-level metrics and the durability of the systems you leave behind

• Establish technical direction that holds across org boundaries, through strategy docs, RFCs, and architecture reviews, reducing the need for repeated alignment and enabling teams to make good decisions independently

• Spot systemic risks and opportunities others miss, positioning multiple orgs to respond before problems become crises, by staying close to the business and maintaining deep context across domains

• Build patterns and frameworks that become engineering defaults, measured by adoption across teams and the degree to which they enable others to move faster without sacrificing quality

• Steward the health of multiple systems and guide their evolution, balancing short-term pragmatism with long‑term architectural integrity

• Shape engineering culture and grow the people around you through mentorship, internal collaboration, external speaking, and investing in new programs or processes that help scale Whatnot engineering

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 our New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles hub.

You

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.

As our next Senior Staff Engineer you should have 10+ years of software engineering experience, including a track record of cross‑org technical leadership at consumer scale, plus:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience

• Deep mastery in one or more technical domains, you're the go‑to expert for the hardest questions, and you stay hands‑on enough to maintain credibility and exercise judgment

• A proven track record of cross‑org impact, not just excellent work within a team, but influence that changed how multiple teams build, operate, or think

• Strong technical judgment: the ability to challenge designs, identify failure modes, make principled trade‑offs, and know when to take shortcuts and when to harden systems

• Experience building systems and patterns that outlast individual ownership, foundations others build on, not solutions that require the original author to maintain

• Experience delivering on complex, ambiguous, cross‑functional initiatives, shipping consistently despite unclear requirements, misaligned stakeholders, or missing support

• A collaborative, low‑ego approach, giving credit freely, resolving cross‑org conflicts productively, and advocating for the less‑recognised

• Experience at consumer scale, high‑traffic, high‑reliability systems where correctness, performance, and user trust all matter

• Bonus:

  • You've identified duplication or fragmentation across teams and built a shared solution that preserved autonomy while accelerating everyone

  • You've written an RFC or strategy doc that changed how an org thought about a problem, and then stayed accountable for the outcome

  • You've stepped outside your domain to unblock a critical initiative because it needed to get done

  • You use Whatnot as a buyer or seller and can speak to the product with real context

  • You've mentored engineers who went on to operate at a higher level than they would have otherwise

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.