Staff Software Engineer

Who you are

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
• 8+ years (for Staff) or 10+ years (for Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering experience
• Strong mastery of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, state management, etc
• Deep experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink, etc.)
• Strong software design, algorithmic, and data-structure skills
• Proficiency in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Go) and scripting
• Experience with messaging, caches (e.g., Redis, RocksDB), time-series stores, and data pipelines
• Proven track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, especially in an ads, ranking, or ML serving context
• Excellent communication skills, ability to influence cross-organizational stakeholders
• Proven track record of delivering features end-to-end and can ship products and features lightning-fast without sacrificing quality
• Strong ownership instincts — capable of driving projects from inception to production and beyond
• The ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly
• Startup experience at a high-growth company — working in fast-paced, rapidly evolving product environments with frequent experimentation (nice to have)
• Experience with ads systems (bidding, auction, attribution, measurement, etc.), infrastructure, and international commerce (nice to have)

What the job involves

• Ads is a growing engineering team dedicated to building the systems that help Whatnot sellers grow their businesses. Our products operate at the intersection of marketplace dynamics, auction mechanics, ranking, and distributed systems
• As an engineer on the Ads team, you will shape the technical foundation of Whatnot’s advertising marketplace. You’ll design auction systems that allocate limited buyer attention across sellers, balance marketplace and customer outcomes, and operate reliably at Whatnot’s scale. This includes bidding, pricing, pacing, ranking, forecasting, and real-time decision-making
• This role requires strong technical judgment, comfort navigating ambiguous domains, and the autonomy to lead foundational projects from inception through production. You’ll work closely with product, machine learning, and infrastructure teams to make sound trade-offs and ship high-impact systems quickly without compromising quality
• In this role, you will…
• Architect and lead the implementation of high-throughput, low-latency backend systems that power ad auctions, bidding, pacing, ranking, and delivery
• Design auction mechanisms that balance seller value, buyer experience, marketplace efficiency, and long-term ecosystem health
• Build foundational services for budget management, allocation, forecasting, experimentation, attribution, and measurement
• Develop reliable integrations between real-time auction services, machine learning models, data pipelines, and marketplace systems
• Own the performance, resilience, observability, and scalability of critical services throughout their production lifecycle
• Define service contracts, architectural patterns, fault-isolation strategies, and capacity plans for systems used by multiple product teams
• Lead technical decisions for new auction and monetization capabilities, including how experiments graduate into durable platform infrastructure
• Partner with product and machine learning teams to translate marketplace problems into practical backend and algorithmic solutions
• Lead design and code reviews, mentor senior engineers, and raise the engineering bar across system design, testing, deployment, and operations
• Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems for critical production systems
• Develop the technical roadmap for auction infrastructure and connect foundational investments to measurable seller, buyer, and marketplace outcomes

Benefits

• Wellness: Health, dental, vision, and life insurance plans. We also cover some of the cost for your dependents as well.
• Compensation: Generous compensation, including a competitive base salary and equity. Whatnot offers monthly reimbursement for internet and phone costs, along with a one-time home office set-up allowance. Whatnot offers a pension plan and matches employee contributions of up to 4% of the employee’s base salary.
• Recharge: Whatnot gives you the freedom to take time off as you see fit. And, we take company-wide Winter and Summer breaks so we can recharge. Whatnot provides a monthly allowance for wellness expenses. We know that to take care of our customers, we have to take care of ourselves. Supplemental health and life insurance coverage comes standard at Whatnot. 16 weeks of paid parental leave, and an additional one-month gradual return-to-work period.* Plus an additional childcare allowance, and a lifetime allowance for family planning, including adoption and fertility expenses. *The leave allowances provided by Whatnot may be dictated / informed by your country’s legal requirements,
• Flexibility: As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together.