Software Engineer, Discovery; Search

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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

🚀 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. We’re re‑defining 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, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone. We’re just getting started!

Search engineers at Whatnot are responsible for building the best search experience for users to find the most relevant content on the platform: streams, products, and other community items. To achieve our goals, we are passionate about understanding, building, and maintaining a healthy ecosystem where buyers find engaging content and sellers thrive with their business. We focus on a wide variety of problems: taxonomy, search and filters, retrieval and ranking algorithms, as well as content understanding.

We make data‑informed decisions and ship quickly to benefit our users. The software team has a lot of individual responsibility and many more freedoms, so we need to hire people we can trust. Your ability to make good tradeoffs and exercise good judgment is essential to us.

At this time, we are hiring Backend Engineers for the Search team. We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our New York City, San Francisco, Seattle or Los Angeles hub.

👋 You

• 4+ years of software engineering experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Software engineering experience with a track record of applying practical methods to solve real‑world problems on consumer‑scale data.
• Experience in applied statistical and machine‑learning fields e.g. Search, Recommendations, Fraud & Anomaly Detection, Experimentation and Causal Analysis.
• Knowledge of at least 3 languages (we primarily use Python, Elixir, JavaScript, and are open to others).
• Excellent product instincts. You first think about users rather than the best technical solution.
• You are known for shipping products and features lightning‑fast.
• You’re an excellent problem solver and don’t need to be told exactly what to do.
• Ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly.
• Proven track record of delivering features.
• Startup experience at a high‑growth company.

🎁 Benefits

• Flexible Time off Policy and Company‑wide Holidays (including a spring and winter break)
• 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 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.

💛 EOE

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: $170K - $230K

Seniority level:
Mid‑Senior level

Employment type:

Full‑time

Job function:
Engineering and Information Technology