Staff Software Engineer

About the role

🚀 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

We’re hiring Staff Software Engineers across multiple engineering pillars at Whatnot — including Buyer Growth, Seller Growth, Trust & Risk, Discovery & Personalization, Search, AI Developer Tools, and Customer Experience.

As a Staff Engineer at Whatnot, you will operate as a technical leader within and across teams. You’ll partner with Engineering, Product, Data, Design, and Leadership to define architectures, drive large cross-functional initiatives, and build the distributed systems that power one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the world.

This is a high-impact role for engineers who thrive in fast-moving environments and want to shape systems that directly influence millions of buyers and sellers.

What You’ll Do:

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Lead the design and evolution of large, distributed systems that power live auctions, payments, search, recommendations, trust systems, growth funnels, and more.

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Own ambiguous, high-leverage technical problems from inception to production — and set the long-term architectural direction.

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Act as the technical lead for major initiatives, driving alignment across multiple teams without formal management authority.

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Balance urgency and technical excellence, making principled trade-offs that unlock rapid iteration without sacrificing long-term scalability.

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Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, mentorship, and hands-on contributions to critical systems.

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Partner with leadership to identify the highest-impact investments for scaling reliability, performance, and developer velocity.

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Help Whatnot scale through its next phase of hypergrowth, ensuring our systems remain resilient as we expand globally.

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 Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, or Seattle hub.