Machine Learning Engineer, Growth

About the role

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. The Buyer Growth team is responsible for driving Whatnot’s top-of-funnel growth and first-time buyer success. We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to accelerate buyer growth at Whatnot through intelligent, data-driven experiences. As the first ML engineer, you’ll build and own ML models for personalization in onboarding and user targeting in our acquisition and engagement channels. This is a high-impact role on a team directly responsible for growing Whatnot’s buyer base and improving first-time user conversion.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and productionization of ML models that power user acquisition, activation, and retention (e.g., ranking models, targeting systems, uplift modeling).
• Own the full ML lifecycle: build and maintain data pipelines, feature engineering, model training, deployment, and online experimentation.
• Build feedback loops from postbacks, conversions, and downstream revenue signals.
• Identify and prioritize high-impact opportunities where machine learning can unlock growth, collaborating with product, engineering, data, and marketing stakeholders.
• Drive technical excellence and establish ML best practices across the Buyer Growth team.

Requirements

• 5+ years of industry experience building and deploying ML systems at scale.
• Demonstrated success in leading end-to-end ML projects that drove measurable business outcomes.
• Deep expertise in personalization, ranking, or user modeling; strong intuition around user behavior in consumer products.
• Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, and common ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost).
• Strong communication and leadership skills; ability to influence roadmap and align cross-functional teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building ML applications in E-commerce or Social products.
• Prior experience in growth domains: user segmentation, retention modeling, large scale recommendation systems, notification ranking, etc.

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 and home office setup allowance.
• Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet.
• Care benefits and 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.
• Parental Leave: 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work.

Pay

Compensation Range: $190K - $280K