Software Engineer, Messaging Platform

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego, a growth mindset, and leaning into action and high impact goes a long way here.

As our next Backend Engineer you should have:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and shipping backend systems in production environments.

Strong experience designing, building, and operating scalable, maintainable backend services.

Strong technical judgment and the ability to make thoughtful tradeoffs between speed, quality, reliability, and long-term maintainability.

Experience working in fast-moving, cross-functional product or platform environments.

Comfort owning ambiguous problem spaces and turning them into clear technical plans and shipped outcomes.

Strong communication and collaboration skills, especially when partnering across engineering, product, design, and data.

A product-minded approach to engineering — you care not just about whether a system works, but whether it creates value for users and partner teams.

Nice to have:

Experience with messaging, notifications, lifecycle, CRM, or engagement platforms.

Experience building distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or high-throughput asynchronous workflows.

Familiarity with experimentation, attribution, ranking, personalization, or recommendation-adjacent systems.

Experience improving observability, alerting, and operational excellence for production systems.

Familiarity with modern backend stacks such as Python, Elixir, or JavaScript/TypeScript.

Experience building products in marketplace, social, creator, or consumer environments.

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.