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Senior Production Engineer

Whatnot· Engineering
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Hybrid (Remote (US))$207k - $290kFull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Production Engineers embed with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to improve reliability, performance, and scalability of systems at Whatnot, focusing on live video and real-time commerce, incident response, capacity planning, and observability. Role is remote with hubs in SF/NYC; requires 5+ years experience and US work eligibility.

Responsibilities

  • - Go deep with the embedded team to raise reliability, performance, and scalability, writing code to achieve those goals.
  • - Hunt anomalies across traffic, latency, error, and cost signals; trace root causes across services, storage, and clients.
  • - Connect operational signals to business impact: identify degradations that matter and cohorts affected.
  • - Work where risk concentrates: payments, live video, search, bidding path, and security.
  • - Eliminate scale bottlenecks in production and address systemic issues, not just individual instances.
  • - Prepare for peak events via capacity modeling, load testing, and failure drills.
  • - Improve observability to enable faster anomaly detection.
  • - Put AI to work on operations for anomaly detection, on-call assistance, remediation, and toil reduction.
  • - Share on-call with the embedded team and act as escalation point for live incidents.
  • - Lead incident response for complex cross-team failures and drive systemic fixes.

Qualifications

  • - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
  • - 6+ years building and debugging production services at scale.
  • - Software engineer’s identity with a focus on production reliability and systems building.
  • - Strong systems and distributed systems fundamentals (failure modes, saturation, queues, cascading failures, Linux/networking/storage under load).
  • - Observability and production debugging experience; capacity/performance engineering, load/resilience testing, incident command, or large-scale migrations experience.
  • - Ability to work well embedded in other teams and earn trust quickly.
  • - Fluency across languages/technologies; comfortable in AWS or GCP with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code; backend primarily Python and Elixir, Go for performance-sensitive infra.
  • - Bonus: experience with high-traffic, real-time, event-driven, or live streaming systems.

Skills

Required:Production engineeringDistributed systemsObservability and debuggingCloud and IaCProgramming languages
Nice to have:Incident response

Benefits

  • - Flexible Time off Policy and Company-wide Holidays (spring and winter break)
  • - Health Insurance options (Medical, Dental, Vision)
  • - Work From Home Support
  • - Care benefits
  • - Retirement: 401k with employer match up to 4% (US) and Pension plans internationally
  • - Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
  • - Parental Leave
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Whatnot

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in the U.S.

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in the U.S., connecting buyers and sellers in real-time across any category – from collectibles like trading cards to comics, fashion, sneakers, and more.

marketplacee-commerce
Company profileWebsite

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