Software Engineer, Search & Discovery Platform

Software Engineer, Search & Discovery Platform

Join the future of e‑commerce as a foundational member of the Search & Discovery Platform team tnot is the largest live‑shopping platform in North America and Europe, blending community, commerce, and entertainment in a unique marketplace for live shopping.

$170,000 – $230,000 per year

We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to define the technical direction and design a world‑class scalable Discovery system. You will own critical decisions around retrieval, ranking, real‑time stream processing, content understanding, and personalized discovery at extreme scale. You will partner closely with product, machine learning, and platform teams to build reliable, high‑performance services.

• Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommendation system solutions for real‑time, dynamic feeds.
• Build a scalable, stable, low‑latency discovery experience.
• Partner with machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to apply 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.

In addition to these role‑specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:

• 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 a high level of autonomy.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.

Job‑specific qualifications:

• Industry experience building and scaling a high‑volume platform.
• Ability to work autonomously, lead cross‑product initiatives, and communicate findings to leadership.
• Experience in machine learning fields such as recommendations, content understanding, and search.
• Expertise designing and building scalable, maintainable backend systems.
• Proficiency in visualization and monitoring tools (Data Dog, Grafana, etc.).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms and managed services (AWS Sagemaker, Lambda, Kinesis, S3, EC2, EKS/ECS, Kafka, Flink/Spark, Open Search, Elastic Search, Lucene, SOLR).
• Experience with concurrent programming in distributed systems (Async
  
  IO Python preferred) and associated optimizations.
• Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or GCP) and infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform).
• 5+ years of experience and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

• Generous Holiday and Time Off Policy
• Health Insurance options:
  Medical, Dental, Vision
• Work From Home support:
  • Home office setup allowance
  • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
• Care benefits:
  • Monthly wellness allowance
  • Annual childcare allowance
  • Lifetime benefit for family planning (adoption or fertility expenses)
• Retirement: 401k offering in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and pension plans internationally
• Monthly dog‑food allowance: all Whatnot employees are encouraged to use the platform as both buyer and seller, supported by an allocated budget
• Parental leave: 16 weeks paid + one month gradual return to work (company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements)

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.

Seniority level:
Mid‑Senior level |

Employment type:

Full‑time | Job function:
Engineering and Information Technology | Industries:
Technology, Information and Internet