Engineering Manager, Discovery & Search Platform

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. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. 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.

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.

As a senior leader in our Discovery team, you will play a pivotal role in the growth and evolution of the Whatnot marketplace and platform. You will oversee our Discovery Platform team, working closely across engineers, product and operations teams to build scalable, reliable and performant Discovery systems that meet the needs of Whatnot’s live social marketplace across millions of users.

Working in a highly cross functional role, you’ll make key decisions about how we integrate retrieval, ranking through machine learning, real-time and stream processing, content understanding, materialization into a highly personalized discovery experience that unlocks product iterations while providing strong reliability. An ideal candidate will be a seasoned people leader with experience building discovery backend and data systems at scale, with a knack for working closely with product engineers to solve immediate problems for our users while making right tradeoffs towards building a platform.

Learn more about the Discovery systems at Whatnot from our blog posts on Evolving Feed Ranking, Whatamix, LLMs for Search.

• Lead and mentor a team of highly skilled engineers, guiding them through complex technical challenges and helping them achieve personal and professional growth.
• Focus on ensuring engineers can work effectively and quickly, building within and leveraging platform services.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to influence product decisions and ensure engineering solutions meet both business and technical needs.
• Own the architecture and development of critical platform initiatives that build and scale retrieval, ranking and search for dynamic feeds with low-latency requirements.
• Hire, mentor, and grow a diverse, high-performing team, fostering an inclusive team culture.
• Build a scalable platform that provides ergonomic access to advanced discovery and search capabilities across the organization.
• Partner closely across the machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to accelerate Discovery capabilities to solve for Whatnot’s business needs.
• Define and advance our technical approach to scalable recommendation systems.

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco hubs.

In addition to embodying our cultural principles, great candidates will also have:

• 10+ years of experience in discovery engineering or platform engineering leadership roles, with at least 1-2 years of experience managing teams.
• Experience in building and scaling retrieval systems, real-time services, ranking and discovery systems.
• Strong experience with software engineering best practices, focusing on maintaining high code quality, reducing technical debt, and improving performance at scale.
• Proven experience in guiding teams to deliver complex, large-scale systems with an emphasis on reliability and scalability.
• A focus on developer velocity and ergonomics, improving engineering practices to increase speed and quality of…