Head of Ads Quality Engineering

Whatnot•New York, NY

46d•Hybrid

About The Position

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 Ads+Promos is a growing engineering team at Whatnot that is dedicated to building products and systems to help sellers grow their business, stand out in a competitive marketplace and strengthen their brands. The Ads Quality subteam is responsible for ensuring the most relevant, high-performing ads and promotions reach users across all our ad formats and discovery experiences. This team owns the retrieval and ranking stages in the ads delivery funnel, balancing relevance for users and ROI for advertisers. As we expand into new features and ad formats, this team will be critical to maintaining user trust while scaling advertising revenue. We're seeking an experienced Head of Ads Quality leader to build and lead a world-class team of machine learning and backend engineers. You'll own the technical strategy for our ads quality systems, developing advanced ML models to surface the most engaging and relevant promoted content. This is a high-impact role where you'll define the technical direction, mentor exceptional engineers, and work cross-functionally to build the next generation of ads products. 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 Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco or Seattle hub. 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. Beyond strong alignment with Whatnot's cultural values, you'll bring:

Requirements

M.S. or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Economics, Statistics, or equivalent professional experience
10+ years of industry experience building and shipping production machine learning systems at scale
5+ years of leadership experience managing engineering or analytics teams
Strong expertise in ML fundamentals: ads system, marketplace incentives systems, ranking systems, recommendation algorithms, retrieval, personalization from ground up
Experience with large-scale data pipelines, feature engineering, and model serving infrastructure
Strong communication and collaboration skills; ability to work effectively across product, data, and business teams
Demonstrated ability to balance innovation with shipping and reliability
A collaborative mindset - especially with product, data science, and ML counterparts - to drive measurable business outcomes.
Strategic and technical leadership that raises the bar for engineering excellence.

Nice To Haves

Proficiency in Python and/or Scala; familiarity with ML frameworks (e.g PyTorch, XGBoost, etc.)

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.