Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Research

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

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Lead research projects across the marketplace dynamics problem area: simulation, auction and allocation mechanics, long-term objective modeling, exploration and information value, or marketplace experimentation methods

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Take ideas from hypothesis to production: literature review, prototyping, offline validation, shadow testing, and online experiments shipped through partner teams in Discovery and the Seller org

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Build models of how the marketplace behaves as a system: learned simulators that predict segment-level effects of ranking and policy changes, and surrogate models of long-term marketplace outcomes

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Model Whatnot's actual market mechanics: auction and bidding dynamics, and discovery exposure allocation as a portfolio problem, including allocation to rising sellers

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Advance how a multi-sided live marketplace evaluates changes: off-policy evaluation, switchback and interference-robust experiment designs, and variance reduction

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Contribute to Whatnot's external technical presence through publications, open-source work, and public benchmarks

NYC Based:

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance (50 miles) of our New York City hub.

👋 You

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high-impact drive goes a long way here. As our next Machine Learning Engineer you should have:

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5+ years of industry experience building and deploying ML models to solve user problems at scale

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Depth in at least one of: recommendation systems, causal inference, off-policy evaluation, reinforcement learning and bandits, auction or mechanism design, or marketplace experimentation

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A track record of applying scientific methods to solve real-world problems on consumer-scale data