Software Engineer, Safety XP

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

Job summary

Whatnot is building the future of live commerce with a remote-enabled, globally distributed team. We are seeking a Software Engineer to design and maintain protective systems that safeguard buyers and sellers while enabling rapid product evolution.

You will own diverse problems across platforms, collaborating with leadership to deliver practical, scalable protections and performance improvements. A strong data-driven mindset is essential.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
• Data-driven mindset enabling critical thinking about growth headwinds and abuse prevention systems.
• Ambition to move fast without sacrificing quality; focus on delivering value for users.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop systems to protect the platform: build production algorithms and infrastructures that mitigate systemic risks for buyers, sellers, and the Whatnot community.
• Balance risk and user experience: monitor impact of protective systems on trusted users, minimizing friction while adding value.
• Respond in real time to threats: architect event-driven pipelines and detection frameworks for near real-time responses to high-risk behavior.
• Contribute across the full development lifecycle: ideation, scoping, prototyping, load testing, deployment, and monitoring of resilient solutions.
• Drive cross-team initiatives: collaborate across product surfaces and operational teams, surface insights to leadership via dashboards and documentation.
• Continuously evolve defenses: stay ahead of abuse patterns and adapt defenses quickly and rigorously.

Skills

4+ years software engineering

Data-driven mindset

Autonomy

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

Dagster

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

Safety XP sits at an intersection of real time auctions, transactions and video, all happening at once. This team decides what can be sold, to whom, and where and what happens the moment something goes wrong. Some of what you’ll dig into:

• Giving people real control over their accounts, enforced in the moment, not on a delay.

• Navigating a genuinely complex global regulatory landscape, where the rules of what’s sellable change by country and by season.

• Building the backbone that both “here’s why this got flagged” and “here’s why this got blocked” run on, the kind of system every other safety feature ends up depending on.

• Working shoulder-to-shoulder with leadership to decide and deliver what’s right for the end users.

You’ll own genuinely varied problems, not one narrow project, and you’ll be in the room for how they get solved on every platform, not just the API layer.

What you’ll do:

• Design and develop systems to protect the platform : Build and iterate on production algorithms and infrastructures that mitigate systemic risks and safeguard buyers, sellers, and the broader Whatnot community.

• Balance risk and user experience : Proactively monitor the impact of protective systems on trusted users, ensuring interventions deliver more value than friction.

• Respond in real time to threats : Architect event-driven pipelines and detection frameworks that enable near real-time responses to high-risk user behavior.

• Contribute across the full development lifecycle : Engage in ideation, scoping, prototyping, load testing, deployment, and monitoring to deliver resilient and scalable solutions.

• Drive cross-team initiatives : Collaborate across multiple product surfaces and operational teams, surfacing insights to leadership and stakeholders through dashboards, notebooks, and clear written documentation.

• Continuously evolve defenses : Stay ahead of emerging abuse patterns, abuse vectors, and account integrity risks by iterating quickly and rigorously testing solutions.

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 Software Engineer you should have 4+ years of total software engineering experience, plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.

• Business intuition & a data-driven mindset that enables you to think critically about the growth headwinds abuse prevention systems can create. Explicit data science or machine-learning experience is a huge plus.

• Obsession with impact. You are focused on driving value for users & have a track record of deploying simple solutions wherever feasible. You move as fast as possible without sacrificing quality.

• Relentnessness & entrepreneurship. You prioritize your work ruthlessly & run through walls to get things done. Your curiosity drives you to dig into user problems & craft suggestions on how we can address them.

• Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams.

• Comfortability with data warehouses and transformation tools such as Snowflake, dbt, Dagster.

• Professionalism around co

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.