Software Engineer, AI Dev Tools

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe where you can buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re redefining e‑commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a unique experience. As a remote‑co‑located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Australia, we’re building the future of online marketplaces – together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone. And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we’re looking for bold, forward‑thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. 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.

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Developer Tools team and be a primary contributor of our AI Tooling work end‑to‑end. In this role, you will build and own the AI tooling that shapes how Whatnot’s engineering organization—and increasingly, non‑engineering teams—write code, ship software, and operate systems faster and more effectively.

This is not a machine learning or data science role. You won’t be training models—you’ll be building the tooling, infrastructure, and workflows that allow AI coding agents and assistants to operate effectively within Whatnot’s codebase and processes. You should be deeply familiar with the current generation of AI development tools, especially tools provided by the big 3 LLM companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and have broad knowledge of other AI and LLM products and services.

Critically, you must be a strong software engineer first. You’ll serve as the primary interface between the Developer Tools team and Whatnot’s AI Tooling Working Group—a cross‑functional community group that tracks the bleeding‑edge frontier of AI tooling. You’ll gather feedback, identify high‑impact opportunities, and feed that context into the team’s roadmap and build priorities.

Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our Los Angeles or San Francisco hubs.

• Building and shipping AI tooling across the full spectrum—from near‑term developer productivity wins to long‑term autonomous agent capabilities—while helping shape what we prioritize next based on what you see working (and not working) on the ground.
• Designing and building sandboxed, containerized environments where AI agents can operate autonomously—running code, executing tests, and iterating on solutions with appropriate guardrails.
• Building multi‑agent orchestration systems and workflows, including CI‑fixing agents, SRE context agents, and other autonomous AI capabilities that reduce toil and accelerate delivery.
• Enabling non‑engineers (PMs, designers, operations) to leverage AI tools effectively through purpose‑built workflows, onboarding experiences, and low‑code/no‑code interfaces.
• Building and optimizing AI‑aware developer infrastructure: CLAUDE.md configurations, MCP servers, prompt engineering frameworks, and context management systems that make AI assistants more effective in our codebase.
• Deploying, monitoring, and maintaining the infrastructure supporting AI tools and workflows to ensure high availability, performance, and reliability for the organization.
• Evaluating and integrating emerging AI tools and platforms as the landscape evolves—staying ahead of the curve and bringing the best of the ecosystem into Whatnot.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and shipping production systems. You’re a software engineer first—backend‑leaning is fine, but you’re comfortable getting around a frontend codebase too and ideally have enough breadth across different stacks to understand what good tooling looks like beyond your home turf.
• A genuine developer tooling enthusiast who’s built or improved internal tools, obsessed over local dev…