Engineering Manager, Customer Experience

Role

The Customer Experience Engineering team builds the systems that help buyers and sellers get support when something goes wrong—and the products, platforms, and intelligence that make that support scalable. This is a high-impact engineering leadership role at the intersection of customer experience, marketplace operations, automation, and trust.

Responsibilities

• Seller Provided Support (SPS) is one of our most important initiatives: it enables sellers to resolve buyers' post-purchase issues, strengthens buyer–seller trust, and reduces avoidable support volume and refunds.
• This role is end-to-end. You will own outcomes, technical strategy, organizational health, and execution across multiple workstreams.
• You will work closely with Product, Design, Operations, Trust, Fraud, Data Science, ML/LLM Platform, Logistics, Payments, and other engineering teams to build a coherent support experience rather than a collection of disconnected flows.
• Success looks like a CX organization that scales with Whatnot's growth: buyers and sellers receive clearer and faster resolutions in a coherent experience, support can proactively intervene before frustration compounds, sellers have the tools and configurability to run a scaled business, agents focus on the highest-risk and most complex cases, automation is safe and measurable, and feedback from escalations, CSAT, sentiment, and agent behavior continuously improves our products and policies.
• The engineering team delivers with speed, quality, and strong operational discipline.

Requirements

• Bring deep Customer Experience domain expertise and relevant industry knowledge to shape what Whatnot should invest in and build next.
• Set the technical vision and multi-year roadmap for Customer Experience Engineering, connecting product and platform investments to customer trust, seller success, support efficiency, refund economics, and company growth.
• Lead a team of approximately 8–12 engineers across multiple product and platform workstreams; create clarity around ownership, sequencing, staffing, and trade-offs while hiring, coaching, and developing engineers and engineering leaders.
• Own the strategy and end-to-end outcomes for the CX portfolio - including SPS, CX Inbox, buyer and seller native support flows, and LLM-based chat - ensuring these experiences work together as one coherent support journey.
• Guide the development of LLM-powered and automated support experiences, including Sierra, with high standards for quality, evaluation, guardrails, human escalation, auditability, and safe rollout.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Operations to turn ambiguous customer, marketplace, and business problems into simple, coherent experiences that work across users, countries, sellers, carriers, and support teams.
• Build strong, durable partnerships with CX Operations, Trust & Safety, Fraud, Seller Operations, Data Science, ML/LLM Platform, Logistics, Payments, and adjacent engineering teams. Align on shared goals, define clear contracts, and make dependencies visible early.
• Guide the development of the foundations that make CX scalable: unified support-request data and lifecycle events, structured context, rules and workflow orchestration, traceability, experimentation, quality measurement, and reliable integrations with Zendesk and other support systems.
• Enable configurable seller workflows and dynamic agent tooling that reduce mental load without hiding risk.
• Improve decisioning across classification, context gathering, refunds, logistics, seller responsibility, returns, replacements, and abuse mitigation. Establish configurable and auditable sources of truth for policy and automation, and use signals from escalations, CSAT, sentiment, and interaction outcomes to make support more proactive and self-evaluating.
• Establish a high bar for production readiness, observability, testing, incident response, rollout controls, and holiday-season preparedness.
• Represent CX Engineering in broader technical and business discussions, clarify the most important problems, and make pragmatic decisions when customer, operational, technical, and financial considerations are in tension.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in product or platform engineering, including 5+ years managing engineering teams.
• Experience leading a team or organization through multiple concurrent, technically complex workstreams—not just delivering a single feature or launch.
• A track record of building high-impact, end-to-end customer experiences and the backend systems that support them at scale.
• Strong product judgment: the ability to translate strategic user, operational, and business problems into clear priorities and excellent experiences.
• Technical depth in distributed systems, APIs, data models, event-driven systems, third-party integrations, experimentation, or observability, with the ability to lead architecture discussions and make pragmatic trade-offs.
• Experience partnering deeply with Operations or other business teams whose workflows, tooling, and outcomes are directly affected by engineering decisions.
• The ability to build trusted partnerships across Product, Design, Data Science, ML/LLM, Trust, Fraud, Logistics, Payments, and platform engineering.
• A strong ownership and execution mindset: you surface risks early, create clarity in ambiguity, unblock teams, and stay accountable for outcomes through launch and iteration.
• A people-leadership track record that includes hiring, coaching, developing senior engineers, and building teams that deliver with speed and quality.
• The ability to balance rapid iteration with appropriate safeguards when systems affect customer money, seller livelihoods, trust, fraud exposure, or support operations.

Skills

• Experience with customer support, messaging, case-management, workflow, or operations platforms.
• Experience building or operating AI/LLM-powered user experiences, agent-assist systems, or automation with measurable quality and safety guardrails.
• Experience with marketplaces, commerce, logistics, payments, refunds, or trust and fraud systems.
• Familiarity with Python, Elixir, Postgres, mobile clients, or large-scale experimentation platforms.

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 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

Pay

$245K - $330K

Schedule

Remote co-located team