Software Engineer, Merchant Tooling

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. 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's 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.

The Inventory team supports sellers with managing their merchandise on Whatnot and representing it as accurately as possible so they can reach more buyers. They strive to do this in the fewest steps possible so sellers can get back to what they do best: selling and engaging with their community. Merchant Tooling, a subteam of Inventory, supports the needs of our largest and most complicated sellers.

Whatnot is committed to helping our sellers turn their passion into a business, and as they grow their business with us their needs evolve. We build the systems to be able to support external and internal tooling for sellers with needs at scale, such as integrations to other e-commerce platforms, WMS, ERPs, and accounting software.

As part of the Merchant Tooling team, you will design and build large-scale, highly reliable systems that support our largest and most complex customers. Your work will focus on:

• Delivering seamless, bi-directional data synchronization across marketplace, ecommerce, ERP, and other enterprise systems, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and low-latency data flow.

• Partnering closely with cross-functional stakeholders—including Product, Inventory, Operations, and external partners—to understand business needs, translate them into technical requirements, and drive aligned outcomes.

• Architecting and evolving enterprise-grade systems that remain intuitive for developers, easy to iterate on, and capable of supporting rapid product growth.

• Contributing to and accelerating the broader Inventory team roadmap, providing technical insight, proactive problem-solving, and hands‑on implementation support.

At its core, this team is responsible for building solutions that power how larger enterprise‑level sellers interface with our platform. Your contributions will directly shape the foundation that enables these sellers to onboard, operate, and scale successfully.

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, 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 Software Engineer on Merchant Tooling, you should have 5+ years of generalist software development experience in high growth startups, plus:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience.

• Experience building scalable systems (we primarily use Python, Elixir, JavaScript).

• Ability to work across the stack (backend and frontend).

• Excellent product instincts. You first think about users rather than the best technical solution.

• Proven track record of delivering features. You are known for shipping products and features lightning‑fast.

• Ability to take ownership of an ambiguous area and define and then drive impact.

• Ability to flexibly work across multiple work streams, thriving in a…