RoleThe Orders Platform team, within Whatnot's Payments org, builds and operates the core infrastructure that powers order creation, payment processing, and order lifecycle management across the marketplace. As we continue to scale, we're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a team responsible for ensuring these mission-critical systems remain reliable, resilient, and highly scalable, enabling millions of transactions to move seamlessly from purchase through fulfillment.
What you'll do:
- Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for systems that support hundreds of millions of orders globally, from creation through post-fulfillment.
- Own building and operations for our global Orders Platform, a business-critical area at the center of buyer, seller, and internal operational workflows. Own the core order lifecycle across live and async channels, ensuring orders can be created, completed, and recovered reliably.
- Partner with senior engineers across Payments, Marketplace and Fraud teams on technical direction, staying close enough to challenge designs, make trade-offs, and keep the team focused on the right architecture.
- Drive reliability and scale across the architecture.
- Ensure customer experiences are amazing and helpful and maintain a high bar for correctness in recovery, refunds, cancellations, and terminal-state handling.
- Partner closely with CX, Seller, Marketing, Finance, Tax, and admin surface owners on the internal tooling and workflows that depend on Orders Platform.
- Maintain strong operating mechanisms for the team: planning, execution visibility, on-call, incident response, rollout discipline, and accountability for production behavior.
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 the New York hub. YouIn addition to embodying our cultural principles, great candidates will also have:
- Strong experience in backend or platform engineering, along with experience managing engineering teams in fast-moving environments.
- A track record operating high-scale systems where reliability, correctness, and user trust matter.
- Experience with complex order, transaction, or workflow-heavy systems, including state machines, asynchronous processing, or distributed jobs.
- Strong technical judgment. You should be able to challenge designs, understand failure modes, and guide good engineering trade-offs.
- A high bar for engineering and operational excellence, with deep care for safe execution, observability, ownership, and production quality.
- The ability to set clear direction, translate business needs into focused priorities, and keep a team executing through ambiguity.
- Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, CX, finance, seller-facing teams, and operations.
- Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers while building a transparent, accountable, and collaborative team culture.
- Comfort operating at the intersection of customer experience, internal operations, and financial correctness.
- Whatnot's backend runs on Python and Elixir, with Go used for performance-sensitive components. Direct experience with any of these is a plus; equally strong candidates from other modern backend stacks who are eager to learn are welcome.
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.
