Software Engineer, Horizontal Ops

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is the largest livestream 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.

💻 Role

We’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Horizontal Ops Platform team and help us build world-class internal operations tooling. With Whatnot's rapid growth comes a high volume of complex operational needs, spanning customer support, trust and safety, and other cross-functional workflows that affect both buyer and seller experience. Our team is responsible for building the platform and automations that help our ops teams resolve them quickly, reliably, and at scale. The core of our work is a workflow engine that powers intelligent, automated resolutions across thousands of daily ops decisions.

As a member of the team, you'll build new operator-facing tools and systems, scale internal infrastructure, and design intelligent AI-powered automations to help ops teams work faster and more reliably.

You’ll lead solutions end to end. You’ll translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical solutions and drive delivery and experimentation. Your role will involve creative problem-solving to balance development speed, product impact, and technical excellence.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our New York, San Francisco, Seattle, or Los Angeles hubs.

👋 You

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

As our next Backend Engineer, you should have 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience in high-growth startups, plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.

• Backend Expertise: Proven track record of building platform-level systems and scaling high-throughput backend infrastructure. Experience with Python, Postgres and MySQL is a plus.

• Ownership Mindset: Own projects holistically from inception to production and beyond. You are known for shipping high-quality products and platform level initiatives fast.

• Product Instinct: Excel at translating internal stakeholder and operator needs into effective technical solutions.

• Problem Solving: Thrive in ambiguity and tackle challenging problems with creativity and autonomy.

• Team Leadership: Proactively mentor peers, drive technical standards, and foster an inclusive and high-performing team culture.

🎁 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 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.