Software Engineer, Cloud Engineer - Software, Backend Developer

Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot

Whatnot is the largest livestream 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 has 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.

We’re hiring Staff Software Engineers across multiple engineering pillars at Whatnot — including Buyer Growth, Seller Growth, Trust & Risk, Discovery & Personalization, Search, AI Developer Tools, and Customer Experience.

As a Staff Engineer at Whatnot, you will operate as a technical leader within and across teams. You’ll partner with Engineering, Product, Data, Design, and Leadership to define architectures, drive large cross‑functional initiatives, and build the distributed systems that power one of the fastest‑growing marketplaces in the world.

This is a high‑impact role for engineers who thrive in fast‑moving environments and want to shape systems that directly influence millions of buyers and sellers.

• Lead the design and evolution of large, distributed systems that power live auctions, payments, search, recommendations, trust systems, growth funnels, and more.
• Own ambiguous, high‑leverage technical problems from inception to production — and set the long‑term architectural direction.
• Act as the technical lead for major initiatives, driving alignment across multiple teams without formal management authority.
• Balance urgency and technical excellence, making principled trade‑offs that unlock rapid iteration without sacrificing long‑term scalability.
• Raise the engineering bar through design reviews, mentorship, and hands‑on contributions to critical systems.
• Partner with leadership to identify the highest‑impact investments for scaling reliability, performance, and developer velocity.
• Help Whatnot scale through its next phase of hypergrowth, ensuring our systems remain resilient as we expand globally.

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 Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, or Seattle hub.

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.

As our next Staff Software Engineer, you likely have:

• 8+ years of full‑time software engineering experience, including experience at high‑growth technology companies that saw significant year‑over‑year user or revenue growth.
• A proven track record of leading large technical initiatives in fast‑scaling environments.
• Experience designing and evolving distributed systems at scale such as service‑oriented architectures, event‑driven systems, real‑time systems, high‑throughput APIs, data pipelines.
• A strong foundation in backend and frontend development. You’re comfortable moving between layers and integrating systems end‑to‑end across a variety of languages and technologies (we primarily use Python, Elixir, JavaScript).
• A strong sense of urgency and ownership. You move quickly, unblock teams, and know when to dive deep versus drive alignment.
• Demonstrated ability to act as the technical lead of a team or initiative without direct people management responsibility.
• Experi…