Staff Backend Architect, Ads & Auctions (Remote)

Whatnot; New York (NY); Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Holiday and Time off policy

Health insurance options

Work from home support

Home office setup allowance

Cell phone & internet allowance

Parental leave

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its Ads team to shape the technical foundation of the advertising marketplace. You will design high-throughput auction systems, balance seller and buyer outcomes, and ensure reliable operation at scale.

You’ll collaborate with product, ML, and infrastructure teams, lead architecture decisions, review designs, and mentor engineers while driving production readiness and system-wide performance improvements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years (Staff) or 10+ years (Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering experience.
• Strong mastery of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, state management, etc.
• Deep experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink).
• Strong software design, algorithmic, and data-structure skills.
• Proficiency in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Go) and scripting.
• Experience with messaging, caches (Redis, RocksDB), time-series stores, and data pipelines.
• Proven track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, especially in ads, ranking, or ML serving context.
• Excellent communication skills, ability to influence cross-organizational stakeholders.
• Proven track record of delivering features end-to-end quickly without sacrificing quality.
• Strong ownership instincts — drive projects from inception to production and beyond.
• Ability to pick up new technologies quickly.
• Startup experience at high-growth company (nice to have).
• Experience with ads systems (bidding, auction, attribution, measurement), infrastructure, and international commerce (nice to have).

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead the implementation of high-throughput, low-latency backend systems powering ad auctions, bidding, pacing, ranking, and delivery.
• Design auction mechanisms balancing seller value, buyer experience, marketplace efficiency, and ecosystem health.
• Build foundational services for budget management, allocation, forecasting, experimentation, attribution, and measurement.
• Develop reliable integrations between real-time auction services, ML models, data pipelines, and marketplace systems.
• Own performance, resilience, observability, and scalability of critical services throughout production lifecycle.
• Define service contracts, architectural patterns, fault-isolation strategies, and capacity plans for multi-team use.
• Lead technical decisions for new auction and monetization capabilities, including experiments graduating to durable platform infra.
• Partner with product and ML teams to translate marketplace problems into backend and algorithmic solutions.
• Lead design and code reviews, mentor senior engineers, raise engineering bar across design, testing, deployment, operations.
• Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems for critical production systems.
• Develop the technical roadmap for auction infrastructure and connect investments to measurable outcomes.

Skills

Backend engineering

Distributed systems

High-throughput systems

Go

Python

Kafka

Flink

Code reviews

Mentoring

System design

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Redis

RocksDB

Python

Go

Job description

Whatnot is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for its Ads team to shape the technical foundation of the advertising marketplace. You will design high-throughput auction systems, balance seller and buyer outcomes, and ensure reliable operation at scale.

You’ll collaborate with product, ML, and infrastructure teams, lead architecture decisions, review designs, and mentor engineers while driving production readiness and system-wide performance improvements.