Staff Backend Architect: Real-Time Ad Auctions

Whatnot Inc.; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Work From Home Support

Home office setup allowance

Cell phone allowance

Internet allowance

Care benefits

Parental Leave

401k retirement

Job summary

Whatnot Inc. is seeking a Staff/ Senior Staff Software Engineer for the Ads team. You will shape the technical foundation of Whatnot’s advertising marketplace, designing auction systems and building high-throughput, low-latency services.

You will collaborate with product, ML, and infrastructure teams to ship impactful systems, own their production lifecycle, and drive architectural decisions across multiple product teams.

Qualifications

• 8+ years (Staff) or 10+ years (Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering.
• Strong mastery of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, state management.
• Deep experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing.
• Proficiency in Python and/or Go and scripting.
• Experience with messaging, caches, time-series stores and data pipelines.
• Proven track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, esp. ads/ranking/ML serving.

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead high-throughput, low-latency backend systems for ads auctions.
• Design auction mechanisms balancing seller value, buyer experience, and marketplace health.
• Build services for budget management, forecasting, experimentation, attribution, and measurement.
• Develop integrations between real-time auction services, ML models, data pipelines, and marketplace systems.
• Own performance, resilience, observability, and scalability of critical services.
• Define service contracts, patterns, fault isolation, and capacity plans for multi-team use.
• Lead technical decisions for new auction and monetization capabilities.
• Partner with product/ML teams to translate problems into backend/algorithmic solutions.
• Lead design/code reviews, mentor engineers, raise engineering bar.
• Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems.
• Develop the technical roadmap for auction infrastructure and connect investments to outcomes.

Skills

Backend/distributed systems

Distributed systems fundamentals

High-throughput systems

Low-latency services

Kafka

Flink

Python

Go

Scripting

Data pipelines

Messaging

Caches (Redis, RocksDB)

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Job description

Whatnot Inc. is seeking a Staff/ Senior Staff Software Engineer for the Ads team. You will shape the technical foundation of Whatnot’s advertising marketplace, designing auction systems and building high-throughput, low-latency services.

You will collaborate with product, ML, and infrastructure teams to ship impactful systems, own their production lifecycle, and drive architectural decisions across multiple product teams.