Whatnot Logo

Whatnot

Software Engineer, Discovery Feed & Browse

Job Posted 4 Days Ago Reposted 4 Days Ago
Easy Apply
San Francisco, CA
Senior level
Easy Apply
San Francisco, CA
Senior level
The Software Engineer will develop scalable backend systems for discovery features, collaborate with machine learning teams, and mentor others.
The summary above was generated by AI

🚀 Whatnot

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re building the future of ecommerce, bringing together community, shopping and entertainment. We are committed to our values, and as a remote co-located team, we operate out of hubs within the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, and Germany today.

We’re innovating in the fast-paced world of live auctions from fashion, beauty, electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants. Whatnot has something for everyone.

And, we’re growing. Whatnot has been one of the fastest growing marketplaces and we’re hiring forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas.

💻 Role

We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members of our Discovery Feed & Browse team. You will partner across the company and design scalable feed and browse solutions based on a deep understanding of critical business goals. The ideal candidate will support initiatives end to end with software and work closely with data & machine learning engineering teams.

We are looking for a backend engineer with a track record of shipping product features at scale. You should excel at making the right tradeoffs between building it fast and building it right. We’ll often prototype new ideas quickly, and then need to build them for extreme scale while coordinating closely with other teams - the ideal person for this role is an expert at both of these approaches.

  • Ship product features to deliver high-quality Discovery experiences for users
  • Build and maintain a scalable, stable, low latency feed and browse experience
  • Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommendation systems solutions for real-time, dynamic feeds
  • Partner closely across the machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to utilize models to solve discovery problems
  • Contribute scalable solutions across various serving stacks at the feed, search, machine learning service, and Discovery application layers.
  • Define and advance our technical approach to scalable recommendation systems.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York City 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 Software Engineer you should have 5+ years of experience, plus:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
  • Industry experience with a track record of applying practical methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data.
  • Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams. You can mentor others and prioritize building inclusive, supportive teams.
  • Experience in machine learning fields (e.g. Recommendations, Content Understanding and Search).
  • Expert at designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems.
  • Firm grasp of visualization tools for monitoring and logging e.g. DataDog, Grafana
  • Familiarity with cloud computing platforms and managed services such as AWS Sagemaker, Lambda, Kinesis, S3, EC2, EKS/ECS, Kafka, Flink/Spark.

💰Compensation

$185,000 - $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.

Top Skills

Aws Sagemaker
Datadog
Ec2
Ecs
Eks
Flink
Grafana
Kafka
Kinesis
Lambda
S3
Spark

Whatnot San Francisco, California, USA Office

San Francisco, CA, United States

Similar Jobs at Whatnot

4 Days Ago
Easy Apply
3 Locations
Easy Apply
Senior level
Senior level
eCommerce • Mobile
As a Frontend Engineer on the Risk team, build user-friendly systems to moderate shows, monitor bad behavior, and enhance user experience as the platform scales. Requires strong ownership skills and the ability to make impactful product decisions.
Top Skills: GraphQLJavaScriptNext.JsReact
4 Days Ago
Easy Apply
San Francisco, CA, USA
Easy Apply
Senior level
Senior level
eCommerce • Mobile
The role involves maintaining a CI/CD pipeline, building development tools, deploying services, optimizing workflow, and providing architecture recommendations.
Top Skills: AWSCi/CdDockerElixirGCPKubernetesPythonTerraform
4 Days Ago
Easy Apply
San Francisco, CA, USA
Easy Apply
Senior level
Senior level
eCommerce • Mobile
As a Software Engineer, you'll design and maintain scalable backend systems for recommendation solutions, collaborating across teams to enhance user discovery experiences.
Top Skills: Aws Ec2Aws EcsAws EksAws KinesisAws LambdaAws S3Aws SagemakerDatadogFlinkGrafanaKafkaPythonSpark

What you need to know about the San Francisco Tech Scene

San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area attracts more startup funding than any other region in the world. Home to Stanford University and UC Berkeley, leading VC firms and several of the world’s most valuable companies, the Bay Area is the place to go for anyone looking to make it big in the tech industry. That said, San Francisco has a lot to offer beyond technology thanks to a thriving art and music scene, excellent food and a short drive to several of the country’s most beautiful recreational areas.

Key Facts About San Francisco Tech

  • Number of Tech Workers: 365,500; 13.9% of overall workforce (2024 CompTIA survey)
  • Major Tech Employers: Google, Apple, Salesforce, Meta
  • Key Industries: Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, fintech, consumer technology, software
  • Funding Landscape: $50.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2024 (Pitchbook)
  • Notable Investors: Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins
  • Research Centers and Universities: Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of San Francisco; Santa Clara University; Ames Research Center; Center for AI Safety; California Institute for Regenerative Medicine
By clicking Apply you agree to share your profile information with the hiring company.

Sign up now Access later

Create Free Account

Please log in or sign up to report this job.

Create Free Account