Backend Engineer, Risk

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot! 

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, and Germany, we’re building the future of online marketplaces—together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to rare collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.

And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. 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

Risk is an engineering team at Whatnot that is dedicated to building systems and features which ensure our users have positive, safe experiences on Whatnot - we believe everyone is entitled to thrive on our platform. 

• As a software engineer on the Risk team, you can expect to build systems and products that allow our users to better moderate their shows, help our internal team action and mitigate issues, solve complex systems problems to monitor & detect bad behavior from reams of data, and build solutions that scale to our next 20x of growth.
• The most important qualities you'll need are making sound product decisions, navigating new domains seamlessly, taking extreme ownership, and shipping high-quality products fast. We always prioritize the highest impact features and ship them quickly. 
• The software team has a lot of individual responsibility and many more freedoms, so we need to hire people we can trust. Your ability to make good trade-offs and exercise good judgment is essential to us.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY, and Seattle, WA hubs.

👋 You

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here.
As our next Backend Technical Lead, you should have 7+ years of software engineering experience, plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• At least 2 years of experience in a Trust & Safety, Fraud, Integrity, or Risk domain.
• Knowledge of multiple programming languages (we primarily use Python, Elixir, JavaScript - knowledge of these in particular not required)
• Excellent product instincts. You first think about users rather than the best technical solution.
• You’ve built systems that scale at a high growth company before, and can do it again with minimal guidance.
• Your confident in your skills to mentor others, and prioritize building inclusive, supportive teams
• Project owner - you’ve strong ownership instincts and can lead projects from inception to production, and beyond.
• Ship products and features lightning-fast without sacrificing quality.
• Excellent problem solver and don’t need to be told exactly what to do.
• Comfortable working across the stack (backend and frontend).
• Ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly.
• Proven track record of delivering features.  

💰Compensation

For US-based applicants: $185,000/year to $245,000/year + benefits + equity

The salary range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary, not benefits (more details below) or equity.

🎁 Benefits 

• Flexible Time off Policy and Company-wide Holidays (including a spring and winter break)
• 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
• 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.

💛 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.