Software Engineer, Data Foundations

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe, allowing users to buy, sell, and discover a wide range of products, from trading cards to electronics. The company is rapidly expanding and prioritizes user experience and impactful work.

• Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next‑generation capabilities at Whatnot.
• Lead the buildout and evolution of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, moving them from early investment to production‑ready usage company‑wide.
• Design scalable, reliable, multi‑tenant data infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on an existing platform.
• Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems.
• Build high‑quality systems that support real‑time analytics, event‑driven applications, and machine‑learning infrastructure needs across Whatnot.
• Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and partner cross‑functionally to bring that architecture to life.
• Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine‑learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development.
• Help shape broader company architecture across orchestration, stream processing, real‑time systems, analytics, and content understanding.
• Apply Dev Ops/SRE practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, monitoring, and incident response, to keep platform systems reliable at scale.
• Help define and enforce data governance and compliance standards across our data lake and downstream systems.

• 8+ years of experience building well‑tested, API‑driven applications and services that run at scale in production.
• Track record of building scalable, high‑performance distributed systems.
• Strong experience with streaming data systems (Kafka, Flink, Pulsar) and/or orchestration platforms (Airflow, Dagster, Temporal), especially at the platform layer.
• Hands‑on experience designing and operating stateful, real‑time data pipelines at scale (checkpointing, state management, watermarking).
• Experience evaluating architectural trade‑offs in data processing and orchestration systems.
• Experience building multi‑tenant or end‑to‑end data infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases.
• Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift, etc.) and data lake architectures (AWS S3) for processing and serving data products.
• Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability (monitoring, alerting, incident management).
• Familiarity with Dev Ops/SRE practices and CI/CD tooling (Git Hub, Git Hub Actions).
• Understanding of data governance and compliance principles (access controls, retention policies, auditability).

• Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure‑as‑code (e.g., Terraform).
• Proficiency in at least one server‑side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles.
• Self‑starter ethic, thriving under high autonomy.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.

• Generous holiday and time‑off policy.
• Health insurance options (medical, dental, vision).
• Work‑from‑home support: home office setup allowance and monthly allowance for cell phone and internet.
• Care benefits: monthly wellness allowance, annual childcare allowance, and lifetime family‑planning benefits.
• Retirement: 401k offering (Traditional and Roth) with employer match up to 4% of base salary in the US, and pension plans internationally.
• Monthly application allowance to support dog‑fooding the app.
• Parental leave: 16 weeks of paid leave plus one month gradual return; company leave allowances run concurrently with country requirements.

Equal Opportunity Employer
Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and 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.

Compensation Range: $200K - $275K