Whatnot
Software Engineer, Search & Discovery Platform
Whatnot, San Francisco, California, United States, 94199
Software Engineer, Search and Discovery Platform
Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe, blending community, shopping, and entertainment into one community. We’re redefining e‑commerce with innovation and strong values, with hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland.
Base Pay Range \$162,000.00/yr - \$260,000.00/yr
Role We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members in shaping the Discovery Platform. You will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and designing a world‑class scalable discovery system that powers feed, browse, search, and taxonomy systems while catering to the unique challenges of operating a marketplace for live shopping.
We hire for remote or co‑located teams with hubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York. Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of one of these hubs.
What You’ll Do
Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommendation systems solutions for real‑time, dynamic feeds.
Build a scalable, stable, low‑latency discovery experience.
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.
You Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high‑impact drive goes a long way here.
5+ years of experience, Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, or equivalent.
Industry experience building and scaling high‑volume/throughput platforms.
Experience working autonomously and leading initiatives across multiple product areas.
Experience in machine learning fields (e.g., recommendations, content understanding, and search).
Expert in designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems.
Strong 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, OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, Lucene, SOLR.
Concurrent programming patterns across distributed systems (AsyncIO Python preferred) and associated optimizations, profiling, observability.
Infrastructure‑as‑code experience (e.g., Terraform) and cloud‑technology management (AWS or Google Cloud).
Proficiency in at least one server‑side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms, data structures, and software design principles.
Self‑starter ethic, thriving under high autonomy.
Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.
Benefits
Generous holiday and time‑off policy.
Health insurance options (medical, dental, vision).
Work‑from‑home support.
Home office setup allowance.
Monthly allowance for cellphone and internet.
Care benefits:
Monthly allowance for wellness
Annual allowance towards childcare
Lifetime benefit for family planning (adoption or fertility expenses)
Retirement: 401(k) offering for traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary); pension plans internationally.
Monthly allowance to dog‑food 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 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.
Compensation Range: \$162K - \$260K
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Base Pay Range \$162,000.00/yr - \$260,000.00/yr
Role We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members in shaping the Discovery Platform. You will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and designing a world‑class scalable discovery system that powers feed, browse, search, and taxonomy systems while catering to the unique challenges of operating a marketplace for live shopping.
We hire for remote or co‑located teams with hubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York. Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of one of these hubs.
What You’ll Do
Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommendation systems solutions for real‑time, dynamic feeds.
Build a scalable, stable, low‑latency discovery experience.
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.
You Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high‑impact drive goes a long way here.
5+ years of experience, Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, or equivalent.
Industry experience building and scaling high‑volume/throughput platforms.
Experience working autonomously and leading initiatives across multiple product areas.
Experience in machine learning fields (e.g., recommendations, content understanding, and search).
Expert in designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems.
Strong 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, OpenSearch, ElasticSearch, Lucene, SOLR.
Concurrent programming patterns across distributed systems (AsyncIO Python preferred) and associated optimizations, profiling, observability.
Infrastructure‑as‑code experience (e.g., Terraform) and cloud‑technology management (AWS or Google Cloud).
Proficiency in at least one server‑side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms, data structures, and software design principles.
Self‑starter ethic, thriving under high autonomy.
Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.
Benefits
Generous holiday and time‑off policy.
Health insurance options (medical, dental, vision).
Work‑from‑home support.
Home office setup allowance.
Monthly allowance for cellphone and internet.
Care benefits:
Monthly allowance for wellness
Annual allowance towards childcare
Lifetime benefit for family planning (adoption or fertility expenses)
Retirement: 401(k) offering for traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary); pension plans internationally.
Monthly allowance to dog‑food 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 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.
Compensation Range: \$162K - \$260K
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