Software Engineer, Safety XP

About the role

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe, enabling users to buy, sell, and discover products across hundreds of categories. The Safety XP team operates at the intersection of real-time auctions, transactions, and video, determining what can be sold, to whom, and where—while responding instantly when issues arise. You’ll navigate a complex global regulatory landscape, build systems that enforce decisions in real time, and collaborate with leadership to shape policies that impact every user.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop systems to protect the platform: Build and iterate on production algorithms and infrastructures that mitigate systemic risks and safeguard buyers, sellers, and the broader Whatnot community.
• Balance risk and user experience: Proactively monitor the impact of protective systems on trusted users, ensuring interventions deliver more value than friction.
• Respond in real time to threats: Architect event-driven pipelines and detection frameworks that enable near real-time responses to high-risk user behavior.
• Contribute across the full development lifecycle: Engage in ideation, scoping, prototyping, load testing, deployment, and monitoring to deliver resilient and scalable solutions.
• Drive cross-team initiatives: Collaborate across multiple product surfaces and operational teams, surfacing insights to leadership and stakeholders through dashboards, notebooks, and clear written documentation.
• Continuously evolve defenses: Stay ahead of emerging abuse patterns, abuse vectors, and account integrity risks by iterating quickly and rigorously testing solutions.

Requirements

• 4+ years of total software engineering experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience.
• Business intuition and a data-driven mindset to critically assess how abuse prevention systems impact growth.
• Obsession with impact: Focus on driving value for users with a track record of deploying simple, high-quality solutions.
• Relentlessness and entrepreneurship: Ruthlessly prioritize work, overcome obstacles, and proactively dig into user problems to propose solutions.
• Ability to work autonomously, lead initiatives across multiple product areas, and communicate findings to leadership and product teams.
• Comfort with data warehouses and transformation tools such as Snowflake, dbt, or Dagster.

Explicit data science or machine-learning experience is a plus.

Benefits

Whatnot is a remote co-located team with hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. The company values low ego, a growth mindset, and high-impact action, fostering a culture where diverse skills and experiences are respected and supported.

Pay

Compensation range: $170K - $230K.