Software Engineer, Data Foundations

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

About Whatnot

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe where users can buy, sell, or discover items such as trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants. The platform supports real‑time, live‑commerce experiences across many categories and has enabled sellers to build real businesses.

Role

The Data Foundations team leads the design and delivery of services that improve the core product experience and unlock business value for Whatnot. As a Software Engineer, Data Foundations you will:

• Define the technical direction and lead the development of critical data platform systems that enable next‑generation capabilities at Whatnot.
• Build out and evolve our data orchestration and streaming platforms, moving them from early investment to production‑ready usage across the company.
• 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.
• Make key decisions about data system integration and partner cross‑functionally to realize the architecture.
• Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine learning, and data to enable safe, scalable development.
• Shape broader company architecture around 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 the data lake and downstream systems.

Qualifications

8+ years of experience building scalable, high‑performance distributed systems. Additionally:

• Ability to write well‑tested API‑driven applications and services that run at scale in production.
• Strong experience with streaming data systems (Kafka, Flink, Pulsar) and/or orchestration platforms (Airflow, Dagster, Temporal), especially building or evolving the platform layer itself.
• Hands‑on experience designing and operating stateful, real‑time data pipelines at scale, including checkpointing, state management, and watermarking.
• Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs 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).
• Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, maintainability—monitoring, alerting, incident management.
• Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and CI/CD tooling, including GitHub and GitHub Actions.
• Understanding of data governance and compliance principles (data access controls, retention policies, auditability).

General Engineering Requirements

In addition to the role‑specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to:

• Manage cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and be comfortable with infrastructure‑as‑code approaches (e.g., Terraform).
• Be proficient in at least one server‑side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms, data structures, and software design principles.
• Be a self‑starter who thrives under a high level of autonomy.
• Possess exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.

Benefits

• Generous holiday and time‑off policy
• Health insurance options including medical, dental, vision
• Work‑from‑home support
• Care benefits
• Retirement; 401k and pension plans
• Monthly allowance for dog‑fooding the app
• Parental leave: 16 weeks of paid parental leave and one month gradual return to work; company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements.

• Work‑from‑home support includes:
  • Home office setup allowance
  • Monthly allowance for cellphone and internet
• Care benefits include:
  • Monthly wellness allowance
  • Annual allowance toward childcare
  • Lifetime benefit for family planning (adoption, fertility expenses)

Equal Opportunity Employer

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.

Compensation

Compensation Range: $200,000 – $275,000