Software Engineer, Platform Engineering

Software Engineer, Platform Engineering – Whatnot

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This range is provided by Whatnot. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

$/yr - $/yr

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe, redefining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we’re building the future of online marketplaces together. From fashion, beauty, electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions cover a wide variety of goods.

We’re a fast‑growing marketplace looking for bold, forward‑thinking problem solvers across all functional areas.

Platform Engineers at Whatnot own the foundations of our main backends, real‑time services, and storage systems. The team ensures these core platforms evolve to support rapid product growth while remaining reliable and scalable. This role focuses on our Python‑based main backend and storage platforms, helping scale and optimize the runtime, refactor and modularize codebases, improve storage systems, and build shared platform services and components that underpin the product experience.

• Evolving our Python runtime and stack by improving performance, concurrency, memory use, and dependency management.
• Building and scaling core platform services that provide the foundation for reliability, scalability, and developer velocity across engineering.
• Optimizing storage systems for consistency, scale, and performance.
• Embedding observability and reliability patterns into the platform by default.
• Refactoring and modularizing large‑scale codebases to maintain developer velocity and ensure our primary codebases remain a productive environment at scale.
• Partnering with product and infra teams to deliver platform APIs and abstractions that strike the right balance between velocity and long‑term stability.
• Laying the groundwork for future platform needs, from global expansion to enabling new product capabilities.

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience (10+ for Staff‑level).
• Strong experience with large‑scale backend systems, ideally Python, but experience in other stacks (Java, Go, Elixir, etc.) welcome.
• Deep expertise with storage systems (Postgres, Dynamo
  
  DB, Planetscale).
• Proven experience building or scaling messaging, notification, or caching systems.
• Background in refactoring large codebases for scale, performance, and maintainability.
• Hands‑on with runtime and platform optimization such as concurrency models, async patterns, and memory tuning.
• Familiarity with service reliability and observability practices such as metrics, tracing, circuit breakers, and failure isolation.
• Comfortable operating in a cloud‑native environment such as AWS or GCP with Kubernetes, Docker, and Terraform.
• Known for setting strong technical standards and for building patterns that other engineers adopt.
• Bonus: prior experience in a hyper‑growth environment.

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home Support
  • Home office setup allowance
  • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits
  • Monthly allowance for wellness
  • Annual allowance towards Childcare
  • Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
• Retirement: 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We’re passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
• Parental Leave
  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work; company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.

Compensation Range: $190K - $260K

Seniority level:
Mid‑Senior level

Employment type:

Full‑time

Location:

Remote or at our hubs in San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY, or Seattle, WA (must live within commuting distance).