Whatnot is the largest livestream 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.

💻 Role

We’re looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to join the Customer Experience Platform team and help us build a world-class Customer Support platform. With Whatnot’s rapid growth comes a high volume of complex support needs—spanning technical, purchasing, and logistics issues for both buyers and sellers. Our team is responsible for resolving them quickly, reliably, and with high customer satisfaction.

As a member of the team, you’ll build new user-facing experiences, scale internal infrastructure, and design intelligent AI-powered automations to help us solve thousands of customer issues per hour.

You’ll lead solutions end to end. You’ll translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical solutions and drive delivery and experimentation. Your role will involve creative problem-solving to balance development speed, product impact, and technical excellence.

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco or Seattle hub.

👋 You

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.

As our next Backend Engineer, you should have 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience in high growth startups, plus:

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
Backend Expertise: Proven track record of building end-to-end product experiences and scaling high-scale backend systems. Experience with Python, Elixir, and/or Postgres is a plus. Experience with Python, Elixir, and/or Postgres is a plus.
Ownership Mindset: Own projects holistically from inception to production and beyond. You are known for shipping high-quality products and platform level initiatives fast.
Product Instinct: Excel at translating user needs to effective technical solutions.
Problem Solving: Thrive in ambiguity and tackle challenging problems with creativity and autonomy.
Team Leadership: Proactively improve the team environment and foster inclusive, supportive team culture.

🎁 Benefits

Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
Work From Home Support
Home office setup allowance
Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
Care benefits
Monthly allowance for wellness
Annual allowance towards Childcare
Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
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
All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
Parental Leave
16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

💛 EOE

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.

Compensation Range: $195K - $230K