Staff Data Engineer, Analytics Platform

Whatnot; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 207,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous Holiday and Time off Policy

Health Insurance options

Work From Home Support

Care benefits

401k match

Parental Leave

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking a Data Engineer who will own the analytics data strategy and build scalable data systems to power decisions across the company. You will shape internal reporting, BI tooling, and experimentation infrastructure with a focus on speed, accuracy, and long-term scalability.

You will lead the AI strategy for internal tools, define domain data standards, and partner with analytics, product, and engineering to turn complex data into actionable insight.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of data/software engineering experience building data warehouses and distributed systems.
• Design and implement data models for analytical and transactional workloads.
• Hands-on with modern data tooling (Kafka, Debezium, dbt, Spark, Flink, Dagster, Airflow).

Responsibilities

• Own the analytics data strategy end-to-end and drive production-ready data models.
• Drive the AI strategy for internal tooling and experimentation.
• Define and own the domain data strategy and data contracts.
• Guarantee reporting accuracy, speed, and trust across dashboards.
• Translate raw data into clear business insights for stakeholders.
• Set technical standards and mentor the org toward higher craft.

Skills

7+ years exp

Data modeling

Python

SQL

Data warehousing

Kafka

dbt

Spark

Dagster

Airflow

Monte Carlo

Tools

Kafka

Debezium

dbt

Spark

Flink

Dagster

Airflow

Snowflake

BigQuery

Redshift

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

Data is crucial to Whatnot’s mission to bring people together through commerce.

As our newest Data Engineer, you’ll build and scale the systems that power data-driven decisions across the company. You’ll own the strategy that empowers the Analytics team’s tooling which includes but is not limited to internal reporting, agentic tooling, and experimentation.

On any given day, you will:

• Own the analytics data strategy end-to-end. Define how internal reporting, business intelligence, agentic tooling, and experimentation infrastructure are architected, then drive that strategy into production. You'll make the calls on data models, tooling investments, and delivery patterns that balance speed, accuracy, and long-term scalability.

• Drive the AI strategy behind our internal tools. Identify where agentic and LLM-powered tooling can supercharge how the business understands itself, then lead the roadmap that turns those bets into reliable, adopted systems — from prompt and data standards to the infrastructure that makes them trustworthy at scale.

• Define and own the domain data strategy. Establish the metrics that matter, the underlying data that powers them, and the standards for how they're modeled, named, and used across the org. Set the contracts and ownership boundaries that keep every team building on the same source of truth.

• Guarantee consistency, accuracy, and speed in reporting and intelligence. Build the monitoring, testing, and reconciliation systems that make every dashboard and dataset trustworthy — so decision-makers never have to wonder if the number in front of them is right or current.

• Translate raw data into business understanding. Partner cross-functionally with analytics, product, engineering, and business stakeholders to turn complex data into clear, actionable insight — shaping not just what data exists, but how the business actually uses it to make decisions.

• Set the technical bar for the data organization. Establish best practices for modeling, tooling, and data quality that other engineers and analysts build on, and mentor the broader org toward higher craft as an IC lead — without a management chain, but with organization-wide influence.

You

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.

• Have a minimum of 7+ years of experience as a data or software engineer building data warehouses, distributed data systems, or event-driven architectures.

• Can design and implement data models using dimensional, Data Vault, or ledger-style techniques that support analytical and transactional workloads.

• Have deep hands-on expertise with modern data tooling across ingestion (e.g., Kafka, Debezium), transformation (dbt, Spark, Flink), orchestration (Dagster, Airflow), and observability (Monte Carlo, Great Expectations).

• Have operated cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift, including schema design, cost optimization, and workload tuning.

• Are comfortable writing production-grade code in Python or SQL languages, and integrating with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code workflows.

• Enjoy partnering across disciplines engineering, product, analytics to translate messy business requirements into elegant data systems.

• Thrive as a self-starter in a fast-moving environment, owning both the technical design and the operational outcomes of your work.

If designing the data backbone that powers Whatnot’s growth, insights, and product innovation excites you, we’d love to meet you.

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco hubs.
Compensation

For Full-Time (Salary)
US based applicants: $207,000/year to $290,000/year + benefits + equity.

The salary range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills, and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary, not benefits (more details below) or equity.

Benefits

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy

• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision

• Work From Home Support

  • Home office setup allowance

  • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet

• Care benefits

  • Monthly allowance for wellness

  • Annual allowance towards Childcare

  • Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses

• Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally

• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app

  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).

• Parental Leave

  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

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.