Software Engineer, Discovery (Feed)

🚀 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.

💻 Role

We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members of our Discovery Feed & Personalization team. You will partner across the company to lead our Exploration efforts to help new sellers and small categories grow and thrive.

We are looking for a backend engineer with a track record of shipping product features at scale. You should excel at making the right tradeoffs between building it fast and building it right. You should have experience leading and delivering on cross-functional projects, supporting multiple other engineers.

What you'll do:

• Ship product features to deliver high-quality Discovery experiences for users

• Build and maintain a scalable, stable, low latency feed experience

• Build the services and infrastructure to enable efficient exploration systems to help small sellers and new categories grow

• Lead a workstream of multiple other software engineers as the individual responsible for success

• Partner closely across the machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to utilize models to solve discovery problems

• Contribute scalable solutions across various serving stacks at the feed, search, machine learning service, and Discovery application layers.

• 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 City, San Francisco, Seattle or Los Angeles hub.

👋 You

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here.

As our next Software Engineer you should have 5+ years of experience, plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.

• Industry experience with a track record of applying practical methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data.

• Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams. You can mentor others and prioritize building inclusive, supportive teams.

• Experience in discovery-related fields (e.g. Recommendations, Content Understanding, Search, etc.).

• Expert at designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems.

• Firm grasp of visualization tools for monitoring and logging e.g. DataDog, Grafana

• Familiarity with cloud computing platforms and managed services such as AWS Sagemaker, Lambda, Kinesis, S3, EC2, EKS/ECS, Kafka, Flink/Spark.

💰Compensation

For US-based applicants: $195,000 - $230,000/year + benefits + stock options

The salary range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary, not benefits (more details below) or equity in the form of stock options.

🎁 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 on both food and 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

• 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.