Software Engineer, Safety XP

About the role

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe, enabling anyone to buy, sell, and discover the things they love. The Safety XP team operates at the intersection of real-time auctions, transactions, and video, deciding what can be sold, to whom, and where—while responding instantly when something goes wrong.

You’ll tackle a wide range of challenges, from giving users real-time control over their accounts to navigating complex global regulations that vary by country and season. You’ll build the backbone that powers both "why this got flagged" and "why this got blocked," creating systems that every other safety feature depends on. Working closely with leadership, you’ll shape solutions that impact every platform, not just the API layer.

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 that enables you to think critically about the growth headwinds abuse prevention systems can create. Explicit data science or machine-learning experience is a plus.
• Obsession with impact: Focused on driving value for users and a track record of deploying simple solutions wherever feasible. You move as fast as possible without sacrificing quality.
• Relentlessness and entrepreneurship: You prioritize work ruthlessly, run through walls to get things done, and dig into user problems to craft actionable solutions.
• Ability to work autonomously, lead initiatives across multiple product areas, and communicate findings with leadership and product teams.
• Comfortability with data warehouses and transformation tools such as Snowflake, dbt, or Dagster.

Pay

Compensation Range: $170K - $230K