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Staff Software Engineer, Ads

Whatnot· Ads
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Hybrid (New York, NY)$245k - $290kFull-timePosted 4w ago

About the role

Whatnot is hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead and architect high-throughput, low-latency backend systems for the ads and marketplace platform. You will design auction mechanisms, build foundational services, and own production systems related to bidding, pacing, ranking, forecasting, and measurement, partnering with product, ML, and infrastructure teams.

Responsibilities

  • Architect and lead the implementation of high-throughput, low-latency backend systems that power ad auctions, bidding, pacing, ranking, and delivery.
  • Design auction mechanisms that balance seller value, buyer experience, marketplace efficiency, and long-term ecosystem health.
  • Build foundational services for budget management, allocation, forecasting, experimentation, attribution, and measurement.
  • Develop reliable integrations between real-time auction services, machine learning models, data pipelines, and marketplace systems.
  • Own the performance, resilience, observability, and scalability of critical services throughout their production lifecycle.
  • Define service contracts, architectural patterns, fault-isolation strategies, and capacity plans for systems used by multiple product teams.
  • Lead technical decisions for new auction and monetization capabilities, including how experiments graduate into durable platform infrastructure.
  • Partner with product and machine learning teams to translate marketplace problems into practical backend and algorithmic solutions.
  • Lead design and code reviews, mentor senior engineers, and raise the engineering bar across system design, testing, deployment, and operations.
  • Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems for critical production systems.
  • Develop the technical roadmap for auction infrastructure and connect foundational investments to measurable seller, buyer, and marketplace outcomes.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
  • 8+ years (for Staff) or 10+ years (for Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering experience
  • Strong mastery of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, state management, etc.
  • Deep experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink, etc.)
  • Strong software design, algorithmic, and data-structure skills
  • Proficiency in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Go) and scripting
  • Experience with messaging, caches (e.g., Redis, RocksDB), time-series stores, and data pipelines
  • Proven track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, especially in an ads, ranking, or ML serving context
  • Excellent communication skills, ability to influence cross-organizational stakeholders
  • Proven track record of delivering features end-to-end and can ship products and features lightning-fast without sacrificing quality
  • Strong ownership instincts — capable of driving projects from inception to production and beyond
  • The ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly
  • Startup experience at a high-growth company — working in fast-paced, rapidly evolving product environments with frequent experimentation (nice to have)
  • Experience with ads systems (bidding, auction, attribution, measurement, etc.), infrastructure, and international commerce (nice to have)

Skills

Required:Distributed systems designHigh-throughput, low-latency servicesStream processingBackend programmingSystem design & architectureObservability & reliabilityCross-functional collaboration

Benefits

  • Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
  • Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
  • Work From Home Support
  • Care benefits
  • 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
  • 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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