Location
San Francisco, CA
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Engineering
Infrastructure
Compensation
$190K – $260K • Offers Equity
The salary or hourly rate range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary or hourly rate will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills, and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary or hourly rate, not benefits or equity.

JOIN THE FUTURE OF COMMERCE WITH WHATNOT!

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, and Germany, we’re building the future of online marketplaces—together.
From fashion, beauty, and electronics to rare collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.
And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. 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.

Platform Engineers at Whatnot own the foundations of our main backends, real-time services, and storage systems. The team ensures these core platforms evolve to support rapid product growth while remaining reliable and scalable.
This role is focused on our Python-based main backend and our storage platforms. You will help scale and optimize the runtime, refactor and modularize our codebases, improve storage systems, and build shared platform services and components that underpin the product experience.

You will work on problems like:

• Evolving our Python runtime and stack by improving performance, concurrency, memory use, and dependency management.
• Building and scaling core platform services that provide the foundation for reliability, scalability, and developer velocity across engineering.
• Optimizing storage systems for consistency, scale, and performance.
• Embedding observability and reliability patterns into the platform by default.
• Refactoring and modularizing large-scale codebases to maintain developer velocity and ensure our primary codebases remain a productive environment at scale.
• Partnering with product and infra teams to deliver platform APIs and abstractions that strike the right balance between velocity and long-term stability.
• Laying the groundwork for future platform needs, from global expansion to enabling new product capabilities.

This is a highly visible role: the platform team provides the technical foundation that allows Whatnot to scale rapidly while remaining reliable.