Staff Backend Engineer, Ads Platform & Auctions (Remote)

Whatnot; New York (NY); On-site; USD 245,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Work From Home Support

Home office setup

Cell phone & Internet allowance

Parental Leave

401(k) match

Job summary

Whatnot, the leading live shopping platform, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help build and scale its ads infrastructure and advertising marketplace. You will design high-throughput services, oversee auction mechanics, and partner with product, ML, and infra teams to deliver fast, reliable features.

You will lead architecture, code reviews, and production readiness while mentoring engineers and shaping the technical roadmap for auction infrastructure and monetization across our

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 10+ years of backend/distributed systems engineering experience (Staff) or 8+ (Senior Staff).
• Strong mastery of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, state management.
• Experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink).
• Proficiency in Python and/or Go; scripting skills.
• Experience with messaging, caches, time-series stores, and data pipelines.
• Proven track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load.
• Excellent communication and cross-team influence.

Responsibilities

• Architect and lead high-throughput backend systems for ads auctions, bidding, pacing, ranking, and delivery.
• Design auction mechanisms balancing seller value, buyer experience, marketplace efficiency, and ecosystem health.
• Build services for budget management, allocation, 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 across production lifecycles.
• Define service contracts, patterns, fault isolation, and capacity plans for cross-team use.
• Lead decisions for new auction and monetization capabilities and how experiments scale.

Skills

Distributed systems

Architectural design

Leadership

Communication

Go

Python

Kafka

Flink

Redis

RocksDB

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science

Tools

Kafka

Flink

Redis

RocksDB

Job description

Whatnot, the leading live shopping platform, is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to help build and scale its ads infrastructure and advertising marketplace. You will design high-throughput services, oversee auction mechanics, and partner with product, ML, and infra teams to deliver fast, reliable features.

You will lead architecture, code reviews, and production readiness while mentoring engineers and shaping the technical roadmap for auction infrastructure and monetization across our