Staff Software Engineer – Ads, Promos

October 10

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Whatnot

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Marketplace • eCommerce

Whatnot is a dynamic online marketplace platform that facilitates live shopping experiences. Users can buy, sell, and discover products they love, engaging in a community-driven environment through live shows. Whatnot ensures a secure shopping experience by vetting sellers and offering protection for unsatisfactory purchases. The company values privacy, providing consent management tools for their users to control cookie usage and personal data processing.

201 - 500 employees

Founded 2021

🏪 Marketplace

🛍️ eCommerce

💰 $260M Series D on 2022-07

📋 Description

• Architect, design, and lead the implementation of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that power ad delivery, ranking, signal pipelines, and attribution. • Own core foundational services (e.g., storage, attribution, streaming pipelines, APIs) and drive their evolution, performance tuning, resilience, and scalability. • Define and enforce architectural patterns, service contracts, fault-isolation, and capacity planning across teams that build on top of the Ads Foundation stack. • Lead cross-functional initiatives to integrate new ad features or experiments into the foundational layers without sacrificing performance or safety. • Mentor and guide senior engineers, lead code reviews, design reviews, and promote best practices in system design, testing, observability, and deployment. • Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-mortem processes for critical system failures. • Evangelize reliability, scalability, and simplicity across product-oriented ad teams; drive technical roadmap, trade-offs, and de-risking strategies. • Understand our buyer and seller experiences and become an expert in helping them effectively scale their business through ads & monetization products.

🎯 Requirements

• 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).

🏖️ Benefits

• Health insurance • Retirement plans • Paid time off • Flexible work arrangements • Professional development opportunities