Staff Software Engineer, Discovery Platform

Whatnot; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Work From Home

Home office allowance

Internet stipend

Wellness stipend

Parental leave

401k match

Dogfood budget

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead Discovery Platform and retrieval/recommendations. You will spend ~60% strengthening the platform's capacity, reliability, and shared building blocks, and 40% partnering with ranking and ML 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, and mentor others along the way.

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
• Ability to lead technical initiatives across teams and ship solutions amid ambiguity.
• Experience with search/recommendation at scale is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve search and serving infrastructure to handle live shopping spikes.
• Build retrieval systems for feed and search teams to add sources quickly.
• Collaborate with ranking/ML engineers to productionize models with low latency.
• Set technical direction for Discovery Platform and influence partner roadmaps.
• Own complex systems end to end from architecture to on-call.
• Raise engineering bar via hands-on coding, reviews, and mentorship.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Kafka

Redis

ML collaboration

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's in CS or related field

Tools

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Redis

Kafka

Valkey

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

Discovery shapes what buyers see when they open Whatnot, from the For You feed and search results to recommended live shows and listings. Discovery Platform builds the systems that make those experiences possible. Our team owns search infrastructure on OpenSearch, a low-latency feature and key-value serving layer, the retrieval framework that assembles feeds, and the pipelines that keep our indices fresh. Teams across Discovery and beyond rely on these systems to build and ship products.

We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical work across Discovery Platform and product-facing retrieval and recommendations. You'll spend roughly 60% of your time strengthening the platform's capacity, reliability, and shared building blocks, and 40% partnering with ranking and machine learning engineers to bring new discovery experiences to buyers. You'll join a small team of senior backend engineers who own their systems from design through production and on-call.

This is a high-impact, hands-on role for someone who finds the most important problems in ambiguous spaces, creates a path forward, and builds solutions that improve both the buyer experience and the pace at which other teams can ship.

What You’ll Do:

• Design and evolve search and serving infrastructure that performs reliably through live shopping traffic spikes, including our largest sales events.

• Build retrieval systems that let feed and search teams add candidate sources safely and quickly.

• Partner with ranking and machine learning engineers to bring models and features into production with the latency and freshness they need.

• Set technical direction for Discovery Platform and influence roadmaps across partner teams, using data and product outcomes to guide decisions.

• Own complex systems end to end, from architecture and implementation through production operations and on-call.

• Raise the engineering bar through hands-on contributions, design and code reviews, and mentorship.

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 City, San Francisco, or Seattle hub.

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.

As our next Staff Software Engineer, you likely have:

• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience, including building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.

• A track record of leading substantial technical initiatives across teams, defining problems clearly, aligning partners, and shipping solutions through ambiguity.

• Experience designing reliable, low-latency backend systems such as search infrastructure, retrieval services, event-driven systems, or streaming data pipelines. Experience with search or recommendations at scale is a strong plus.

• Hands-on experience with technologies such as OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, Redis or Valkey, and Kafka or similar streaming systems. We value strong fundamentals and relevant systems experience over an exact match to our tools.

• An understanding of how recommendation systems fit together, including candidate generation, ranking, and feature serving, and the ability to partner effectively with machine learning engineers.

• Strong product instincts: you connect performance and reliability decisions to whether buyers discover things they want and whether sellers reach the right audience.

• A commitment to hands-on engineering, with the judgment to write code, document architectural decisions, and drive alignment when needed.

• Experience mentoring engineers and improving the quality of designs, code, and operational practices.

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.

Please note: Whatnot will only contact you through official @whatnot.com email addresses. If you see an email impersonating a Whatnot recruiter, please disregard and report it as spam.

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.