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Staff Software Engineer, Ads ML

Whatnot· Engineering
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Hybrid (New York, NY)$245k - $300kFull-timePosted 4d ago

About the role

Staff Software Engineer role on Whatnot's Ads team, responsible for building high-throughput, low-latency backend systems for ad auctions, bidding, pacing, and ranking, and for leading foundational projects from inception to production in a fast-growing live commerce platform.

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 (Staff) or 10+ years (Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering experience.
  • - 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).
  • - 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 and ability to influence cross-organizational stakeholders.
  • - Proven track record of delivering features end-to-end and shipping quickly without sacrificing quality.
  • - Strong ownership instincts to drive projects from inception to production and beyond.
  • - Ability to quickly pick up new technologies.
  • - Startup experience at a high-growth company (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 languages (Python/Go)System architecture leadershipCross-team 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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