Machine Learning Engineer, Growth

Whatnot•San Francisco, CA

1d•Remote

About The Position

The Buyer Growth team is responsible for driving Whatnot’s top-of-funnel growth and first-time buyer success. We're looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to accelerate buyer growth at Whatnot through intelligent, data-driven experiences. As the first ML engineer, you’ll build and own ML models personalization in onboarding and user targeting in our acquisition and engagement channels. This is a high-impact role on a team directly responsible for growing Whatnot’s buyer base and improving first-time user conversion.

Requirements

5+ years of industry experience building and deploying ML systems at scale.
Demonstrated success in leading end-to-end ML projects that drove measurable business outcomes.
Deep expertise in personalization, ranking, or user modeling; strong intuition around user behavior in consumer products.
Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, and common ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost).
Strong communication and leadership skills; ability to influence roadmap and align cross-functional teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience building ML applications in E-commerce or Social products
Prior experience in growth domains: user segmentation, retention modeling, large scale recommendation systems, notification ranking, etc.

Responsibilities

Lead the design, development, and productionization of ML models that power user acquisition, activation, and retention (e.g., ranking models, targeting systems, uplift modeling).
Own the full model lifecycle: from data collection and feature engineering to model training, evaluation, deployment, and online experimentation.
Identify and prioritize high-impact opportunities where machine learning can unlock growth, collaborating with product, engineering, data, and marketing stakeholders.
Drive technical excellence and establish ML best practices across the Buyer Growth team.

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
16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.