Staff Software Engineer, Discovery Platform - Remote/Hybrid

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

Benefits offered by this job

Holiday and Time off Policy

Health Insurance options

Work From Home Support

Home office setup allowance

Cell phone/internet stipend

Wellness allowance

Childcare allowance

Parental leave

401k match program

Dogfooding budget

Job summary

Whatnot seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead Discovery Platform and product-facing retrieval and recommendations. You will split time between strengthening platform capacity and partnering with ranking/ML engineers to ship new discovery experiences.

You’ll join senior backend engineers who own systems from design to production and on-call. This high-impact, hands-on role rewards tackling ambiguous problems and delivering scalable solutions that improve buyer experience and cross-team

Qualifications

• 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven track record leading technical initiatives across teams.
• Experience designing reliable, low-latency backend systems (search, retrieval, streaming).

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve search and serving infrastructure for live shopping traffic.
• Build retrieval systems enabling safe, fast candidate sources for feeds.
• Collaborate with ML engineers to deploy models with latency constraints.
• Set technical direction for Discovery Platform and influence roadmaps.
• Own complex systems end-to-end from architecture to on-call.
• Mentor engineers and improve design and operational practices.

Skills

Distributed systems

Backend engineering

OpenSearch/Elasticsearch

Kafka

Mentoring

System design

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

OpenSearch

Elasticsearch

Redis

Valkey

Kafka

Job description

Whatnot seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead Discovery Platform and product-facing retrieval and recommendations. You will split time between strengthening platform capacity and partnering with ranking/ML engineers to ship new discovery experiences.

You’ll join senior backend engineers who own systems from design to production and on-call. This high-impact, hands-on role rewards tackling ambiguous problems and delivering scalable solutions that improve buyer experience and cross-team