RoleThe Data Platform team at Whatnot builds services that improve our core product experience and unlock meaningful business value. In this role, you will:
- Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next-generation capabilities at Whatnot
- Lead the buildout and evolution of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, helping drive them from early platform investment to production-ready usage across the company
- Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant data infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of an existing platform
- Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems
- Build high-quality systems that support real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and machine learning infrastructure needs across Whatnot
- Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and then partner cross-functionally to bring that architecture to life
- Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development
- Help shape broader company architecture across orchestration, stream processing, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding
- Apply DevOps/SRE practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, monitoring, and incident response, to keep platform systems reliable at scale
- Help define and enforce data governance and compliance standards across our data lake and downstream systems
YouAs our next Software Engineer, Data Platform, you should have 8+ years of experience, plus:
- Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production
- Track record of building scalable, high-performance distributed systems
- Strong experience with streaming data systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar) and/or orchestration platforms (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or Temporal), with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself, not just downstream pipelines.
- Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful, real-time data pipelines at scale, including concepts like checkpointing, state management, and watermarking
- Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in data processing and orchestration systems, including when a given tool is the right solution and when it is not
- Experience building multi-tenant or end-to-end data infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases
- Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) and data lake architectures (e.g., AWS S3) for processing and serving data products
- Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management
- Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and CI/CD tooling, including GitHub and GitHub Actions
- Understanding of data governance and compliance principles (e.g., data access controls, retention policies, auditability)
In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:
- Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (for example, Terraform)
- Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles
- Self-starter ethic, with the ability to thrive under a high level of autonomy
- Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills
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.
