Software Engineer, Messaging Platform

Whatnot; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous time off

Health insurance

Work from home support

Parental leave

Retirement plan (401k)

Dogfooding budget

Job summary

Whatnot is hiring a Backend Engineer for the Messaging Platform team to build backend systems, APIs, and platform capabilities for reliable, scalable, and measurable messaging across push, email, SMS, and in-app channels. You will tackle audience targeting, scheduling, content orchestration, and delivery workflows while maintaining user trust and platform quality.

The role emphasizes collaboration with product, design, data science, and other engineering teams, with a focus on production health,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS or related field or equivalent practical experience.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering in backend systems.
• Experience designing, building, and operating scalable backend services.
• Strong judgment balancing speed, quality, reliability, and maintainability.
• Experience in fast-moving, cross-functional product environments.
• Ability to turn ambiguous problems into clear technical plans and outcomes.
• Excellent communication and collaboration across teams.

Responsibilities

• Build scalable backend services and platform primitives for messaging.
• Design systems for audience targeting, scheduling, and delivery workflows.
• Improve reliability, performance, and observability for high-volume messaging.
• Collaborate with product, design, data science, and other engineers to ship features.
• Create clean APIs and operational patterns for safe multi-team use.
• Contribute to experimentation, attribution, and measurement foundations.

Skills

Backend engineering

Scalable services

System design

Cross-functional collaboration

Technical judgment

Production reliability

Communication skills

Product-minded engineering

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Python

Elixir

JavaScript/TypeScript

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 was 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 Messaging Platform team builds the systems that help teams across Whatnot deliver the right message to the right buyer or seller at the right time. They power communications across push notifications, email, SMS, and in-app messaging experiences, and we're evolving from a delivery platform into a broader messaging and engagement platform.

As a Backend Engineer on Messaging Platform, you will build the backend systems, APIs, and platform capabilities that make messaging at Whatnot reliable, scalable, intelligent, and measurable. You'll work on problems at the intersection of product, platform, and infrastructure: from audience targeting and campaign scheduling to notification settings, experimentation, observability, and the services that power high-volume sends across multiple channels.

This is a strong fit for an engineer who enjoys shipping product-facing platform work, cares deeply about user trust and message quality, and is excited by the challenge of building systems used by many teams across the company.

As a Backend Engineer On This Team, You Will

• Build and evolve scalable backend services and platform primitives that power push, email, SMS, and in-app messaging.
• Design systems for audience targeting, campaign scheduling, content orchestration, delivery workflows, and messaging preferences.
• Improve reliability, performance, and observability for high-volume, business-critical messaging systems.
• Partner closely with product, design, data science, and other engineering teams to build messaging experiences that drive engagement while respecting user trust and platform quality.
• Create clean APIs, abstractions, and operational patterns that allow teams across Whatnot to launch messaging use cases safely and efficiently.
• Contribute to experimentation, attribution, and measurement foundations so teams can understand the impact of messaging investments.
• Help raise the bar on engineering quality through strong technical judgment, thoughtful code reviews, and solid operational habits.
• Contribute to team-wide ownership of production health, incident response, and continuous improvement of platform reliability.

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 or Seattle hub.

You

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We've found that low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here.

As Our Next Backend Engineer You Should Have

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping backend systems in production environments.
• Strong experience designing, building, and operating scalable, maintainable backend services.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience working in fast-moving, cross-functional product or platform environments.
• Comfort owning ambiguous problem spaces and turning them into clear technical plans and shipped outcomes.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, especially when partnering across engineering, product, design, and data.
• A product-minded approach to engineering - you care not just about whether a system works, but whether it creates value for users and partner teams.

Nice To Have

• Experience with messaging, notifications, lifecycle, CRM, or engagement platforms.
• Experience building distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or high-throughput asynchronous workflows.
• Familiarity with experimentation, attribution, ranking, personalization, or recommendation-adjacent systems.
• Experience improving observability, alerting, and operational excellence for production systems.
• Familiarity with modern backend stacks such as Python, Elixir, or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience building products in marketplace, social, creator, or consumer environments.

Benefits

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home Support
  • Home office setup allowance
  • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits
  • Monthly allowance for wellness
  • Annual allowance towards Childcare
  • Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
• 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
  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
• Parental Leave
  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

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.

Compensation Range: $170K - $230K