RoleWe're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead backend engineering for our Feed team within the Discovery organization. This team is responsible for building Whatnot's feeds and recommendation systems, with a major focus on exploration: using feed visibility as a lever to help small sellers and new categories grow.
What you'll do:
- Lead backend engineering for the Feed team, including Whatnot's feed and recommendation systems, with a major focus on feed insertions as a lever to help small sellers and new categories grow.
- Lead and grow a team of backend engineers while raising the bar on engineering quality, backend architecture, scale, reliability, and operational excellence.
- Own a scope that spans both feed experiences and feed foundations, including ranking and product surfaces like For You, category feeds, and vertical scroll, as well as shared backend capabilities like shadow traffic, filtering, hydration, and logging.
- Partner with senior engineers and tech leads on technical direction, system design, and engineering tradeoffs, while creating clarity around Feed engineering scope across shared and sometimes fragmented workstreams.
- Build strong team operating mechanisms across planning, execution visibility, rollout discipline, on-call, incident response, and accountability for production behavior.
- Partner closely with product, machine learning, platform, and client engineering teams to deliver high-quality discovery experiences and shape the future of areas like vertical scroll.
- Coach and develop engineers across the team, improving mentoring consistency, team effectiveness, and the organization's ability to scale through ambiguity.
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 City hub. YouPeople 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 Feed Engineering Manager you should have:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- Engineering management or tech lead management experience leading backend engineers in fast-moving product or platform environments.
- Strong experience designing, building, and operating scalable backend systems, with a track record of improving engineering quality, reliability, and operational excellence.
- Strong technical judgment and systems thinking; you should be comfortable challenging designs, understanding failure modes, and guiding good engineering tradeoffs.
- Experience leading teams through ambiguity, setting clear direction, and maintaining execution momentum in cross-functional environments.
- Strong communication, people leadership, and coaching skills, with experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers.
- Comfort working on product engineering problems, not just infrastructure in isolation.
- Bonus if you have experience in discovery, search, recommendations, feeds, information retrieval, ML-adjacent systems, or modern backend stacks such as Python, or Go.
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.
