Software Engineer, Data Platform

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

The Data Platform team at Whatnot builds services that improve our core product experience and unlock meaningful business value. In this role, you will:

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Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next-generation capabilities at Whatnot

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Lead the buildout and evolution of our Flink platform, helping drive stream processing from early platform investment to production-ready usage across the company.

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Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant streaming infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of an existing platform.

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Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for stream processing systems.

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Build high-quality systems that support real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and machine learning infrastructure needs across Whatnot.

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Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and then partner cross-functionally to bring that architecture to life

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Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development

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Help shape broader company architecture across stream processing, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding

👋 You

As our next Software Engineer, Data Platform, you should have 5+ years of experience, plus:

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Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production

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Track record of building scalable, high-performance distributed systems

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Strong experience with streaming data systems such as Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar, with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself — not just downstream pipelines.