Staff Software Engineer, Discovery Platform (Remote)

Whatnot; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 290,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

401k with employer match

Work From Home Support

Parental Leave

Dogfood allowance

Retirement plans (US)

Job summary

Whatnot is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead Discovery Platform and product-facing retrieval. You will balance platform reliability and new discovery features, collaborating with ML teams to deploy models with low latency.

You’ll mentor peers and shape roadmaps, working across multiple hubs while staying hands-on with code and architecture. Expect to influence end-to-end systems, improve search quality, and own critical services from design through production.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience building large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven track record leading technical initiatives across teams.
• Experience designing reliable, low-latency backend systems (search/inference).
• Experience with OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, Redis, Kafka or similar.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve search and serving infrastructure for live traffic.
• Build retrieval systems enabling safe, fast candidate sourcing.
• Collaborate with ranking and ML engineers to productionize models and features.
• Set technical direction for Discovery Platform and partner roadmaps.
• Own complex systems end to end including ops and on-call.
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering quality through reviews.

Skills

Distributed systems

Leadership

OpenSearch

Redis

Kafka

Backend engineering

Mentoring

Architecture

On-call

ML collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

OpenSearch

Redis

Kafka

Job description

Whatnot is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead Discovery Platform and product-facing retrieval. You will balance platform reliability and new discovery features, collaborating with ML teams to deploy models with low latency.

You’ll mentor peers and shape roadmaps, working across multiple hubs while staying hands-on with code and architecture. Expect to influence end-to-end systems, improve search quality, and own critical services from design through production.