Senior Staff Software Engineer

Whatnot•New York, NY

3d•$280,000 - $330,000•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. 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.

Requirements

10+ years of software engineering experience, including a track record of cross-org technical leadership at consumer scale
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
Deep mastery in one or more technical domains, you're the go-to expert for the hardest questions, and you stay hands-on enough to maintain credibility and exercise judgment
A proven track record of cross-org impact, not just excellent work within a team, but influence that changed how multiple teams build, operate, or think
Strong technical judgment: the ability to challenge designs, identify failure modes, make principled trade-offs, and know when to take shortcuts and when to harden systems
Experience building systems and patterns that outlast individual ownership, foundations others build on, not solutions that require the original author to maintain
Experience delivering on complex, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives, shipping consistently despite unclear requirements, misaligned stakeholders, or missing support
A collaborative, low-ego approach, giving credit freely, resolving cross-org conflicts productively, and advocating for the less-recognized
Experience at consumer scale, high-traffic, high-reliability systems where correctness, performance, and user trust all matter

Nice To Haves

You've identified duplication or fragmentation across teams and built a shared solution that preserved autonomy while accelerating everyone
You've written an RFC or strategy doc that changed how an org thought about a problem, and then stayed accountable for the outcome
You've stepped outside your domain to unblock a critical initiative because it needed to get done
You use Whatnot as a buyer or seller and can speak to the product with real context
You've mentored engineers who went on to operate at a higher level than they would have otherwise

Responsibilities

Drive cross-org technical impact by creating capabilities that don't yet exist, measured by movement in company-level metrics and the durability of the systems you leave behind
Establish technical direction that holds across org boundaries, through strategy docs, RFCs, and architecture reviews, reducing the need for repeated alignment and enabling teams to make good decisions independently
Spot systemic risks and opportunities others miss, positioning multiple orgs to respond before problems become crises, by staying close to the business and maintaining deep context across domains
Build patterns and frameworks that become engineering defaults, measured by adoption across teams and the degree to which they enable others to move faster without sacrificing quality
Steward the health of multiple systems and guide their evolution, balancing short-term pragmatism with long-term architectural integrity
Shape engineering culture and grow the people around you through mentorship, internal collaboration, external speaking, and investing in new programs or processes that help scale Whatnot engineering