Software Engineer, Search & Discovery Platform

Software Engineer, Search & Discovery Platform

Join the future of commerce with Whatnot! Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe. We blend community, shopping, and entertainment into a unique experience. As a remote co‑located team, we build the future of online marketplaces together across hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland.

Base pay range: $170,000 – $230,000 per year. Salary will be based on skills and experience.

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 while meeting the unique challenges of a live‑shopping marketplace.

You will make key decisions about retrieval, ranking through machine learning, real‑time and stream processing, content understanding, and materialization into a personalized discovery experience. An ideal candidate has experience building discovery backend and data systems at scale and partners closely with product engineers.

What You’ll Do

• Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommendation systems for real‑time, dynamic feeds.
• Build a scalable, stable, low‑latency discovery experience.
• Partner closely across machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to utilize models to solve discovery problems.
• Contribute scalable solutions across serving stacks at feed, search, machine learning service, and discovery application layers.
• Define and advance our technical approach to scalable recommendation systems.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience and a bachelor’s degree in CS, statistics, mathematics, software engineering, or equivalent work experience.
• Industry experience building and scaling high‑volume platforms.
• Ability to work autonomously, lead initiatives, mentor others, and communicate findings with leadership.
• Machine learning experience (recommendations, content understanding, search).
• Expert in designing and building scalable, maintainable backend systems.
• Strong grasp of monitoring and logging tools (Data Dog, Grafana).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms and managed services (AWS, GCP, Terraform).
• Concurrent programming expertise in distributed systems (Async
  
  IO, etc.).
• Experience with infrastructure‑as‑code and cloud ops.

All engineering team members also need:

• Proficiency in at least one server‑side programming language (preferably Python) and common algorithms and data structures.
• Self‑starter ethic and high autonomy.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.

Benefits

• Generous holiday and time off policy.
• Health insurance options (medical, dental, vision).
• Work‑from‑home support with home office setup allowance and monthly allowance for cell phone and internet.
• Care benefits with monthly wellness allowance, annual childcare allowance, and lifetime benefit for family planning.
• Retirement: 401(k) with employer match up to 4% for US employees and pension plans internationally.
• Monthly allowance to dog‑food the app.
• Parental leave: 16 weeks paid parental leave plus one month gradual return to work.

Equal Opportunity Employer

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.