Software Engineer, Discovery

🚀 Whatnot

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re building the future of ecommerce, bringing together community, shopping and entertainment. We are committed to our values, and as a remote co-located team, we operate out of hubs within the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, and Germany today.

We’re innovating in the fast-paced world of live auctions from fashion, beauty, electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants. Whatnot has something for everyone.

And, we’re growing. Whatnot has been one of the fastest growing marketplaces and we’re hiring forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas.

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

💻 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 is scalable enough to keep pace with our business growth to power feed, browse, search and taxonomy systems while catering to the unique challenges of operating a marketplace for live shopping! 

Working in a highly cross functional role, you’ll make key decisions about how we integrate retrieval, ranking through machine learning, real-time and stream processing, content understanding, materialization into a highly personalized discovery experience that unlocks product iterations while providing strong reliability. 

An ideal candidate will have experience building discovery backend and data systems at scale, with a knack for working closely with product engineers to solve immediate problems for our users while making right tradeoffs towards building a platform. We’ll often prototype new ideas quickly, and then need to build them for extreme scale while coordinating closely with other teams - the ideal person for this role is an expert at both of these approaches. 

Learn more about the Discovery systems at Whatnot from our blog posts on Whatamix, LLMs for Search.

 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 low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here.

As our next Software Engineer you should have 5+ years of experience, plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
• Industry experience with a track record of applying practical methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data.
• Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams. You can mentor others and prioritize building inclusive, supportive teams.
• Experience in machine learning fields (e.g. Recommendations, Content Understanding and Search).
• Expert at designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems.
• Firm 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.

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

• Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (e.g. Terraform).
• 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.

💰Compensation

$215,000/year to $245,000/year + benefits + equity

The salary range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary, not benefits (more details below) or equity.

🎁 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 on both food and 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
• 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.