Staff Software Engineer, Discovery Platform — Remote

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

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.