Software Engineer, Data Foundations

Whatnot; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 275,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance options

Work-from-home setup allowance

Monthly phone/internet allowance

Wellness allowance

Childcare and family planning benefits

401k with employer match up to 4% (US)

Pension plans internationally

Dog‑fooding allowance

Parental leave benefits

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking a senior data platform engineer to define technical direction and lead the development of critical data systems powering next‑generation capabilities. You will drive the buildout of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, moving them to production usage company‑wide.

You will own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems, while supporting real‑time analytics and ML infra needs

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building production-grade data platforms.
• Experience with streaming data systems and orchestration platforms.
• Designs scalable, multi-tenant data infrastructure for multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Define technical direction and lead development of data platform systems at Whatnot.
• Build out data orchestration and streaming platforms for production use company-wide.
• Design scalable, multi-tenant data infrastructure beyond pipelines.
• Own platform reliability, performance, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing.
• Build real-time analytics, event-driven apps, and ML infrastructure needs.
• Collaborate with product, platform, ML, and data teams to realize architecture.
• Shape company architecture across orchestration, streaming, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding.
• Apply DevOps/SRE practices including CI/CD, automation, monitoring, and incident response.
• Define and enforce data governance and compliance across data lakes and downstream systems.

Skills

API-driven design

Distributed systems

Streaming data platforms

Cloud data stores

DevOps / SRE practices

CI/CD tooling

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Pulsar

Airflow

Dagster

Temporal

Snowflake

BigQuery

Redshift

AWS S3

GitHub

GitHub Actions

Terraform

Job description

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe, allowing users to buy, sell, and discover a wide range of products, from trading cards to electronics. The company is rapidly expanding and prioritizes user experience and impactful work.

Role

• Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next‑generation capabilities at Whatnot.
• Lead the buildout and evolution of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, moving them from early investment to production‑ready usage company‑wide.
• Design scalable, reliable, multi‑tenant data infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on an existing platform.
• Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems.
• Build high‑quality systems that support real‑time analytics, event‑driven applications, and machine‑learning infrastructure needs across Whatnot.
• Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and partner cross‑functionally to bring that architecture to life.
• Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine‑learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development.
• Help shape broader company architecture across orchestration, stream processing, real‑time systems, analytics, and content understanding.
• Apply DevOps/SRE practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, monitoring, and incident response, to keep platform systems reliable at scale.
• Help define and enforce data governance and compliance standards across our data lake and downstream systems.

You

• 8+ years of experience building well‑tested, API‑driven applications and services that run at scale in production.
• Track record of building scalable, high‑performance distributed systems.
• Strong experience with streaming data systems (Kafka, Flink, Pulsar) and/or orchestration platforms (Airflow, Dagster, Temporal), especially at the platform layer.
• Hands‑on experience designing and operating stateful, real‑time data pipelines at scale (checkpointing, state management, watermarking).
• Experience evaluating architectural trade‑offs in data processing and orchestration systems.
• Experience building multi‑tenant or end‑to‑end data infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases.
• Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) and data lake architectures (AWS S3) for processing and serving data products.
• Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability (monitoring, alerting, incident management).
• Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and CI/CD tooling (GitHub, GitHub Actions).
• Understanding of data governance and compliance principles (access controls, retention policies, auditability).

Additional Qualifications for All Engineering Team Members

• Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure‑as‑code (e.g., Terraform).
• Proficiency in at least one server‑side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles.
• Self‑starter ethic, thriving under high autonomy.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.

Benefits

• Generous holiday and time‑off policy.
• Health insurance options (medical, dental, vision).
• Work‑from‑home support: home office setup allowance and monthly allowance for cell phone and internet.
• Care benefits: monthly wellness allowance, annual childcare allowance, and lifetime family‑planning benefits.
• Retirement: 401k offering (Traditional and Roth) with employer match up to 4% of base salary in the US, and pension plans internationally.
• Monthly application allowance to support dog‑fooding the app.
• Parental leave: 16 weeks of paid leave plus one month gradual return; company leave allowances run concurrently with country requirements.

Equal Opportunity Employer
Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and 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.

Compensation Range: $200K - $275K