Software Engineer Discovery (Search)

Whatnot is the largest livestream shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy sell and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards fashion electronics or live plants our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.

As a remote co-located team we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US UK Ireland Poland Germany and Australia. We move fast stay close to our users and focus on the work that drives the most impact.

We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

Search engineers at Whatnot are responsible for building the best search experience for users to find 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 search and filters retrieval and ranking algorithms as well as content understanding. We make data informed decisions and ship quickly to benefit our users. The software 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.

At this time we are hiring Backend Engineers for the Search team.

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 San Francisco Seattle or Los Angeles hub.

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.

• 4+ years of software engineering experience.

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

• Software engineering experience with a track record of applying practical methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data.

• Experience in applied statistical and machine learning fields e.g. Search Recommendations Fraud & Anomaly Detection Experimentation and Causal Analysis.

• Knowledge of at least 3 languages (we primarily use Python Elixir JavaScript and are open to others).

• 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.

• Ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly.

• Proven track record of delivering features.

• Startup experience at a high-growth company.

• 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

  • 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.

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.

What We Do

We bring people together around the things they love and turn their passions into their livelihood.

Why Work With Us

Passion is the centerpiece of our culture. We’ve got passionate buyers sellers and employees. We want you to bring your passions to Whatnot.

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