Engineering Manager, Core Backend Services

🚀 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

As a senior leader in our Infrastructure team, you will play a pivotal role in the growth and evolution of Whatnot’s platform. You will oversee our Platform Engineering team, working closely with engineering, product, and operations teams to build scalable, reliable, and performant systems that will support millions of users as we continue to scale.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and mentor a team of highly skilled engineers, guiding them through complex technical challenges and helping them achieve personal and professional growth.

• Develop and implement strategic roadmaps for platform engineering that align with company objectives, ensuring scalability and supporting developer velocity.

• Focus on ensuring engineers can work effectively and quickly, building within and leveraging our platform services.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to influence product decisions and ensure engineering solutions meet both business and technical needs.

• Drive best practices in software engineering, with a focus on reducing technical debt, improving code quality, and continuously evolving engineering practices to enable faster delivery.

• Own the architecture and development of critical infrastructure initiatives, including backend services, real-time systems, and storage infrastructure.

• Foster a culture of innovation and continuous learning, encouraging experimentation and the adoption of new technologies.

• Monitor industry trends, ensuring that Whatnot remains at the cutting edge of platform and infrastructure technology.

• Scale the team through hiring, mentorship, and leadership development initiatives.

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 San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY, or Seattle, WA hubs.

👋 You

In addition to embodying our cultural principles, great candidates will also have:

• 10+ years of experience in platform engineering or infrastructure engineering leadership roles, with at least 5 years of experience managing teams.

• Experience in building and scaling backend systems, real-time services, and storage infrastructure.

• Strong experience with software engineering best practices, focusing on maintaining high code quality, reducing technical debt, and improving performance at scale.

• Proven experience in guiding teams to deliver complex, large-scale systems with an emphasis on reliability and scalability.

• A focus on developer velocity and ergonomics, improving engineering practices to increase speed and quality of delivery while managing technical debt.

• Exceptional leadership and communication skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate across multiple teams.

• Strong technical background, with the ability to make informed decisions on architecture and technology choices.

• A passion for building and improving technology platforms that scale efficiently.

🎁 Benefits

• Generous Holiday and Time off Policy

• 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 for 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

• All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).

• 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.