Software Engineer, Data Foundations

Whatnot; United States; Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Work From Home Support

Parental Leave

401(k) Retirement Plan

Dogfood allowance

Paid time off

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking an experienced Software Engineer, Data Foundations, to lead the design and development of scalable data platform systems. You will own orchestration and streaming platforms, ensuring reliability and efficient data processing across real-time analytics and ML workloads.

You will collaborate with product, platform, ML and data teams, driving architectural decisions and governance across data lake and downstream systems while applying robust DevOps practices.

Qualifications

• Experience writing well-tested, API-driven services

Responsibilities

• Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems
• Lead the buildout and evolution of data orchestration and streaming platforms
• Design scalable, multi-tenant data infrastructure
• Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs
• Build systems that support real-time analytics and ML infrastructure
• Make key data system integration decisions and drive architecture
• Collaborate with product, platform, ML and data teams for scalable development
• Shape architecture across orchestration, stream processing, real-time systems and analytics
• Apply DevOps/SRE practices to keep platforms reliable at scale
• Define and enforce data governance and compliance standards across data lake and downstream systems

Skills

API-driven services

Distributed systems

Real-time data processing

Stateful streaming pipelines

Cloud data stores

CI/CD & DevOps

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Pulsar

Airflow

Dagster

Temporal

Snowflake

BigQuery

Redshift

AWS

Google Cloud

Terraform

GitHub Actions

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

The Data Foundations team at Whatnot builds services that improve our core product experience and unlock meaningful business value. In this role, you will:

• 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, helping drive them from early platform investment to production-ready usage across the company

• Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant data infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of 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 then 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

As our next Software Engineer, Data Foundations, you should have 8+ years of experience, plus:

• Ability to write 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 (e.g., Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar) and/or orchestration platforms (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or Temporal), with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself, not just downstream pipelines.

• Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful, real-time data pipelines at scale, including concepts like checkpointing, state management, and watermarking

• Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in data processing and orchestration systems, including when a given tool is the right solution and when it is not

• 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 (e.g., AWS S3) for processing and serving data products

• Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management

• Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and CI/CD tooling, including GitHub and GitHub Actions

• Understanding of data governance and compliance principles (e.g., data access controls, retention policies, auditability)

In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:

• Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (for example, Terraform)

• Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles

• Self-starter ethic, with the ability to thrive under a high level of autonomy

• 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 offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally

• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app

• Parental Leave

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.