Backend Engineer - Discovery

🚀 Whatnot

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy sell and discover the things you love. We’re building the future of ecommerce bringing together community shopping and entertainment. We are committed to our values and as a remote co-located team we operate out of hubs within the US UK Ireland Poland and Germany today.

We’re innovating in the fast-paced world of live auctions from fashion beauty electronics to collectibles like trading cards comic books and even live plants. Whatnot has something for everyone.

And we’re growing. Whatnot has been one of the fastest growing marketplaces and we’re hiring forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas.

💻 Role

Discovery engineers at Whatnot are responsible for building the best user experience for finding and engaging with the most relevant content on the platform: streams products and others in the community. To achieve our goals we are passionate about understanding building and maintaining a healthy ecosystem where buyers find engaging content and sellers thrive with their business. We focus on a wide variety of problems: taxonomy browse experience search and recommendations algorithms as well as content understanding. We make data-informed decisions and ship quickly to benefit our users. The team has a lot of individual responsibility and many more freedoms so we need to hire people we can trust. Your ability to make good trade-offs and exercise good judgment is essential to us.

• We are looking for a backend engineer with a track record of shipping product features with high quality engineering designs; someone who can build scalable taxonomy and content management systems and its application to new product features and recommendation algorithms. You should excel at making the right tradeoffs between building it fast and building it right. We’ll often prototype new ideas quickly and then need to build them for extreme scale while coordinating closely with other teams - the ideal person for this role is an expert at both of these approaches.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our San Francisco CA Los Angeles CA New York NY and Seattle WA hubs.

👋 You

As our next backend engineer on Discovery you should have 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science a related field or equivalent work experience.

• Expert at designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems.

• Knowledge of multiple programming languages (we primarily use Python Elixir JavaScript - knowledge of these in particular not required).

• Excellent product instincts. You first think about users rather than the best technical solution.

• You are known for shipping products and features lightning-fast.

• You’re an excellent problem solver and don’t need to be told exactly what to do.

• You can mentor others and prioritize building inclusive supportive teams.

• Experience in taxonomy and/or category graph systems is a plus.

• Experience in machine learning fields is a plus (e.g. Recommendations Content Understanding and Search).

💰Compensation

For US-based applicants: $185000 - $245000/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

• Flexible Time off Policy and Company-wide Holidays (including a spring and winter break)

• Health Insurance options including Medical Dental Vision

• Work From Home Support

  • $1000 home office setup allowance

  • $150 monthly allowance for cell phone and internet

• Care benefits

  • $450 monthly allowance on food

  • $500 monthly allowance for wellness

  • $5000 annual allowance towards Childcare

  • $20000 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

• 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.

💛 EOE

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity and we do not discriminate on the basis of race religion color national origin gender sexual orientation age marital status veteran status parental status disability status or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage support and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.