Staff Software Engineer, Fulfillment Expansion

Whatnot; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Work From Home Support

Home office setup allowance

Internet/cell phone allowance

Parental leave

Retirement plan

Job summary

Whatnot is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for Fulfillment Expansion. You will own complex problems at global scale, partnering with product, design, and engineering leaders to drive product and technical tradeoffs.

You will build scalable systems that enable sellers to ship anything anywhere, at low cost, while improving user experience and delivery speed. You will lead with strong technical judgment, mentor engineers, and shape roadmaps across partner teams.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience.
• 8+ years of full‑time software engineering experience, including building and operating large‑scale distributed systems.
• Strong communication skills and track record of leading substantial technical initiatives across teams.
• Excellent product instincts and focus on solving user problems.
• Experience modeling complex technical domains and building useful abstractions.
• Ability to own ambiguous areas and drive impact.
• Ability to work across multiple workstreams in a fast paced environment.
• Hands‑on engineering with ability to document architectural decisions and drive alignment.
• Experience mentoring engineers and improving design quality.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Product, Design, Data Science, and end users to build scalable solutions.
• Own work end‑to‑end from ideation to monitoring and analysis.
• Design complex systems at the interface of digital and physical worlds.
• Set technical direction for Fulfillment and influence roadmaps across teams.
• Use AI thoughtfully to improve quality and speed while maintaining rigor.
• Raise engineering bar through reviews, mentoring, and hands‑on contributions.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Architecture design

Mentoring engineers

Cross-team collaboration

Product-focused thinking

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science

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

Fulfillment is one of the most operationally complex and business-critical parts of Whatnot. It directly shapes buyer trust and retention, seller confidence, CX burden, trust and enforcement decisions, top-line growth, and the bottom-line economics of the business. The Fulfillment org builds the systems and interfaces that power the fulfillment of tens of millions of shipments per month.

Fulfillment Expansion helps Whatnot grow by making it possible for sellers to ship anything, from anywhere to anywhere, as cheaply as possible. We’re hiring a Staff Software Engineer with both product and platform experience. You'll own complex problems at global scale, partnering with product, design, and engineering leaders to build a deep understanding of the domain, identify and frame product and technical tradeoffs, and guide decisions that accelerate future product development.

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 user experience and the pace at which other teams can ship.

As a Staff Software Engineer on Fulfillment Expansion, you will:

• Partner closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and end users to build scalable and efficient solutions to a wide range of user and business problems.

• Own your work end-to-end, from ideation and architecture all the way through to monitoring, observability, on-call, and experiment analysis.

• Design complex systems at the interface between the digital and the physical worlds, which help our sellers scale and help Whatnot build a great business.

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

• Use AI thoughtfully in day-to-day engineering work to improve quality, learning speed, debugging, and execution, while keeping a strong independent bar for correctness and risk judgment.

• 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:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience.

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

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

• Excellent product instincts. You prioritize solving user problems rather than focusing purely on technical perfection.

• Demonstrated experience modeling complex technical domains and building abstractions that accelerate product development.

• Ability to take ownership of an ambiguous area, define it, and then drive impact.

• Ability to flexibly work across multiple workstreams, thriving in a fast‑paced environment.

• 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.

Nice to have

• Experience in adjacent domains like rideshare coordination, food delivery, marketplace fulfillment, trust/risk operations, or order tracking and exception‑handling systems.

• Experience working on a marketplace or other two‑sided platform.

• Direct experience in logistics, shipping, fulfillment, or payments systems.

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.