Software Engineer, Data Platform

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover collectibles, fashion, electronics, live plants, and more. Our sellers build real businesses across hundreds of categories, and we’re pioneering live commerce at a scale never before seen in the West. As a remote co-located team with hubs in the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia, we move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on high-impact work. We’re one of the fastest-growing marketplaces and were named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes.

About the role

The Data Platform team at Whatnot builds services that improve our core product experience and unlock meaningful business value. In this role, you will:

• Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next-generation capabilities at Whatnot.
• Lead the buildout and evolution of our Flink platform, driving stream processing from early investment to production-ready usage across the company.
• Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant streaming infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of an existing platform.
• Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for stream processing systems.
• Build high-quality systems that support real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and machine learning infrastructure needs.
• Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and partner cross-functionally to bring that architecture to life.
• Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development.
• Help shape broader company architecture across stream processing, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding.

Requirements

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

• Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production.
• Track record of building scalable, high-performance distributed systems.
• Strong experience with streaming data systems such as Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar, with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself—not just downstream pipelines.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful real-time data pipelines at scale, including concepts like checkpointing, state management, and watermarking.
• Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in stream processing systems, including when Flink is the right solution and when it is not.
• Experience building multi-tenant or end-to-end streaming infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases.
• Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) for processing and serving data products.
• Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management.

Skills

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, with the ability to thrive under a high level of autonomy.
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills.

Benefits

• Generous holiday and time-off policy.
• Health insurance options including medical, dental, and vision.
• Work-from-home support and home office setup allowance.
• Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet.
• Care benefits and monthly wellness allowance.
• 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 (use Whatnot as both a buyer and seller).
• Parental leave: 16 weeks of paid leave + one month gradual return to work (company leave allowances run concurrently with country requirements, which take precedence).

Pay

Compensation range: $190K - $270K.