Data Engineer, Payments

Whatnot

$180K — $260K *
Information Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Minimum 3+ years experience in data or software engineering roles.
  • Skilled in designing and implementing data models for analytics and transactions.
  • Deep expertise with modern data tools (e.g., Kafka, dbt, Airflow).
  • Experience operating cloud data warehouses, focusing on schema design and cost optimization.
  • Proficient in writing production-grade code in Python or SQL.
  • Ability to collaborate effectively across engineering and product teams.
  • Self-starter, comfortable in a fast-paced environment with ownership of outcomes.

Responsibilities

  • Own end-to-end data architecture to capture and model critical business data.
  • Build and operate mission-critical data pipelines processing high-volume events.
  • Design and implement canonical data models serving as the source of truth.
  • Enforce data quality with tests, monitoring, and anomaly detection systems.
  • Automate workflows to eliminate manual data handoffs and reconcile services.
  • Support analytics and engineering teams by providing high-quality data through APIs and query systems.

Benefits

  • Generous holiday and time-off policy.
  • Health insurance options including medical, dental, and vision.
  • Work from home support with setup and monthly allowances for internet and phones.
  • Comprehensive care benefits including wellness and childcare allowances.
  • 401k retirement plan with employer match and international pension plans.
  • Monthly allowance for using Whatnot as part of employee development.
  • 16 weeks paid parental leave with gradual return options.
Full Job Description
Role

Data is crucial to Whatnot's mission to bring people together through commerce.

As our newest Data Engineer, you'll build and scale the systems that power data-driven decisions across the company. You'll work directly with stakeholders in payments and finance teams to design reliable data architectures, ship resilient pipelines, and create the foundational data products that power Whatnot's internal and external growth.

On any given day, you will:
  • Own data architecture end-to-end. Define how we capture, model, and serve critical business data then implement it in production. You'll make architectural decisions around storage formats, compute patterns, and SLAs that balance cost, scalability, and consistency.
  • Build mission-critical pipelines. Develop and operate streaming and batch data workflows that process high-volume events across multiple domains user activity, transactions, experimentation, marketing performance, and operational telemetry with tight guarantees for latency, completeness, and accuracy.
  • Design and implement canonical models. Create domain-oriented data models that serve as the source of truth for analytics, ML, and real-time applications. Establish and enforce modeling standards, ownership boundaries, and data contracts across teams.
  • Enforce data quality at scale. Build tests, lineage, monitoring, and reconciliation systems that make every dataset observable and every anomaly actionable.
  • Automate operational workflows. Partner with business systems and platform teams to eliminate manual data handoffs and reconcile data across services, warehouses, and external systems.
  • Enable insights and experimentation. Support analytics, ML, and product engineering teams by exposing high-quality, low-latency data through semantic layers, APIs, and real-time query systems.

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.
  • Have a minimum of 3+ years of experience as a data or software engineer building data warehouses, distributed data systems, or event-driven architectures.
  • Can design and implement data models using dimensional, Data Vault, or ledger-style techniques that support analytical and transactional workloads.
  • Have deep hands-on expertise with modern data tooling across ingestion (e.g., Kafka, Debezium), transformation (dbt, Spark, Flink), orchestration (Dagster, Airflow), and observability (Monte Carlo, Great Expectations).
  • Have operated cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift, including schema design, cost optimization, and workload tuning.
  • Are comfortable writing production-grade code in Python or SQL languages, and integrating with CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code workflows.
  • Enjoy partnering across disciplines engineering, product, analytics to translate messy business requirements into elegant data systems.
  • Thrive as a self-starter in a fast-moving environment, owning both the technical design and the operational outcomes of your work.

If designing the data backbone that powers Whatnot's growth, insights, and product innovation excites you, we'd love to meet you.

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 New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco hubs.
Compensation

For Full-Time (Salary)
US based applicants: $180,000/year to $260,000/year + benefits + equity.

The salary range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills, and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary, not benefits (more details below) or equity.
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.

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