Software Engineer, Data Foundations

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.

As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.

We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

The Data Platform team at Whatnot builds services that improve our core product experience and unlock meaningful business value. In this role, you will:

Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next-generation capabilities at Whatnot

Lead the buildout and evolution of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, helping drive them from early platform investment to production-ready usage across the company

Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant data infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of an existing platform

Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems

Build high-quality systems that support real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and machine learning infrastructure needs across Whatnot

Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and then partner cross-functionally to bring that architecture to life

Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development

Help shape broader company architecture across orchestration, stream processing, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding

Apply DevOps/SRE practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, monitoring, and incident response, to keep platform systems reliable at scale

Help define and enforce data governance and compliance standards across our data lake and downstream systems

As our next Software Engineer, Data Platform, you should have 8+ years of experience, plus:

Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production

Track record of building scalable, high-performance distributed systems

Strong experience with streaming data systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar) and/or orchestration platforms (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or Temporal), with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself, not just downstream pipelines.

Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful, real-time data pipelines at scale, including concepts like checkpointing, state management, and watermarking

Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in data processing and orchestration systems, including when a given tool is the right solution and when it is not

Experience building multi-tenant or end-to-end data infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases

Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) and data lake architectures (e.g., AWS S3) for processing and serving data products

Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management

Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and CI/CD tooling, including GitHub and GitHub Actions

Understanding of data governance and compliance principles (e.g., data access controls, retention policies, auditability)

In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:

Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (for example, Terraform)

Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles

Self-starter ethic, with the ability to thrive under a high level of autonomy

Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.