Staff Backend Engineer, Discovery Platform

Careers; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Remote work options

Home office setup allowance

Monthly device/internet stipend

Parental leave

401k with employer match

Wellness stipend

Learning & development

Dogfooding budget

Job summary

Whatnot seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical work across Discovery Platform and product-facing retrieval and recommendations. You will split time between strengthening platform capacity and partnering with ranking and machine learning engineers to bring new discovery experiences to buyers.

You will join a small team of senior backend engineers who own their systems end to end, from design through production and on-call, in a high-impact, hands-on role.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of full-time software engineering in production.
• Track record leading technical initiatives across teams.
• Experience designing reliable, low-latency backend systems.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve search and serving infrastructure to handle live shopping traffic spikes.
• Build retrieval systems enabling feed and search teams to add sources safely.
• Collaborate with ranking and ML engineers to productionize models with required latency.
• Set technical direction for Discovery Platform and influence partner roadmaps.
• Own complex systems end-to-end from architecture to on-call.
• Mentor engineers and improve design and operational practices.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend design

Mentoring

On-call

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Kafka

Performance & reliability

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS

Tools

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Redis

Valkey

Kafka

Job description

Whatnot seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical work across Discovery Platform and product-facing retrieval and recommendations. You will split time between strengthening platform capacity and partnering with ranking and machine learning engineers to bring new discovery experiences to buyers.

You will join a small team of senior backend engineers who own their systems end to end, from design through production and on-call, in a high-impact, hands-on role.