Software Engineer, Messaging Platform

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 Messaging Platform team builds the systems that help teams across Whatnot deliver the right message to the right buyer or seller at the right time. They power communications across push notifications, email, SMS, and in-app messaging experiences, evolving from a delivery platform into a broader messaging and engagement platform.

As a Backend Engineer on Messaging Platform, you will build the backend systems, APIs, and platform capabilities that make messaging at Whatnot reliable, scalable, intelligent, and measurable. You’ll work on problems at the intersection of product, platform, and infrastructure: from audience targeting and campaign scheduling to notification settings, experimentation, observability, and the services that power high-volume sends across multiple channels.

This role requires living within commuting distance of our New York or San Francisco hub, with flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs.

Responsibilities

• Build and evolve scalable backend services and platform primitives that power push, email, SMS, and in-app messaging.
• Design systems for audience targeting, campaign scheduling, content orchestration, delivery workflows, and messaging preferences.
• Improve reliability, performance, and observability for high-volume, business-critical messaging systems.
• Partner closely with product, design, data science, and other engineering teams to build messaging experiences that drive engagement while respecting user trust and platform quality.
• Create clean APIs, abstractions, and operational patterns that allow teams across Whatnot to launch messaging use cases safely and efficiently.
• Contribute to experimentation, attribution, and measurement foundations so teams can understand the impact of messaging investments.
• Help raise the bar on engineering quality through strong technical judgment, thoughtful code reviews, and solid operational habits.
• Contribute to team-wide ownership of production health, incident response, and continuous improvement of platform reliability.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping backend systems in production environments.
• Strong experience designing, building, and operating scalable, maintainable backend services.
• Strong technical judgment and the ability to make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
• Experience working in fast-moving, cross-functional product or platform environments.
• Comfort owning ambiguous problem spaces and turning them into clear technical plans and shipped outcomes.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, especially when partnering across engineering, product, design, and data.
• A product-minded approach to engineering — you care not just about whether a system works, but whether it creates value for users and partner teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience with messaging, notifications, lifecycle, CRM, or engagement platforms.
• Experience building distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or high-throughput asynchronous workflows.
• Familiarity with experimentation, attribution, ranking, personalization, or recommendation-adjacent systems.
• Experience improving observability, alerting, and operational excellence for production systems.
• Familiarity with modern backend stacks such as Python, Elixir, or JavaScript/TypeScript.
• Experience building products in marketplace, social, creator, or consumer environments.

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.
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work (company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements).

Pay

Compensation Range: $170K - $230K