Engineering Manager, Mobile

Whatnot•San Francisco, CA

6d•$280,000 - $330,000•Hybrid

About The Position

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot! Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values . With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, and Poland, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together. From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone. And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces , we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. 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. 💻 Role As a senior leader within App Platform Engineering, you will play a critical role in shaping the future of Whatnot’s mobile experience. You will lead teams responsible for the mobile foundations that power iOS and Android, partnering closely with product, design, infrastructure, and other platform teams to ensure our apps are fast, reliable, observable, and built to scale. This role is ideal for a leader who combines strong mobile technical instincts with organizational leadership, and who thrives in highly cross-functional environments. You will help set direction, build alignment, and raise the bar for mobile quality and performance across the company. Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, or New York hubs. 👋 You Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high-impact drive goes a long way here.

Requirements

10+ years of experience in software engineering, with significant experience leading mobile teams (iOS, Android, or both).
A strong technical foundation in mobile application architecture, performance optimization, and production reliability.
Deep familiarity with mobile observability and performance tooling, and a strong intuition for diagnosing real-world app issues.
Experience leading teams through ambiguous, high-impact initiatives that require cross-team coordination and influence.
A collaborative leadership style — comfortable driving decisions and navigating trade-offs.
Proven ability to scale teams, develop leaders, and create healthy, high-performing engineering cultures.
Comfort operating at both the strategic and tactical levels, with the judgment to know when to zoom in and when to step back.

Nice To Haves

Bonus: experience working closely with backend or platform teams, or contributing to backend systems directly earlier in your career.

Responsibilities

Lead and mentor a team of highly skilled engineers, guiding them through complex Lead and mentor multiple mobile-focused engineering teams, supporting both iOS and Android development and fostering strong technical leadership across platforms.
Define and drive a long-term mobile platform strategy, balancing near-term delivery with foundational investments in performance, reliability, and developer experience.
Champion mobile performance and observability, ensuring teams deeply understand app health, user experience metrics, and production behavior at scale.
Partner closely with product, design, infrastructure, and data teams to ensure mobile architecture and execution align with broader company goals.
Drive clarity and alignment across teams by setting expectations, building buy-in, and navigating complex cross-functional tradeoffs.
Establish and evolve best practices around mobile architecture, testing, release quality, and technical debt management.
Support and grow senior ICs and managers, creating clear growth paths and a strong bench of mobile leadership.

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
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.