Staff Production Engineer

Whatnot•Los Angeles, CA

11d•$245,000 - $290,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Whatnot is hiring a Staff Production Engineer to embed with product, platform, and infrastructure teams and improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of systems operating at scale. The role investigates anomalies, bottlenecks, and degradation, traces issues to root cause, writes fixes, and works with system owners to ensure problems stay resolved. Production Engineers are accountable both for the systems within their embedded team and for issues that occur between teams. The work focuses on a live commerce platform where video, real-time auctions, and payments share critical paths, so system behavior can directly affect business outcomes. The engineer will connect operational signals to user and business impact, address risks in areas such as payments and live video, prepare for peak events, improve observability, and explore AI-enabled operational tools. The role shares on-call with the embedded team, escalates live incidents, and leads responses to complex cross-team failures. The position offers flexibility to work from home or a global office hub, but team members must live within commuting distance of the San Francisco or New York City hub. Whatnot values in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
At least 9 years building and debugging production services at scale, gained through software engineering, production engineering, SRE, systems engineering, or a related path.
A software-engineering orientation, with interest in writing code and building systems, and attentiveness to anomalies in production signals.
Strong systems and distributed-systems fundamentals, including failure modes, saturation, queueing behavior, cascading failures, and Linux, networking, and storage behavior under load.
Depth in observability and production debugging, plus experience in at least one of capacity and performance engineering, load and resilience testing, incident command, or large-scale migrations under production constraints.
Ability to embed effectively with another team, work in its codebase, earn trust, and improve its systems.
Fluency across languages and technologies and comfort with cloud-native environments such as AWS or GCP, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code.
Ability to live within commuting distance of the San Francisco or New York City hub.

Nice To Haves

Experience with high-traffic, real-time, event-driven, or live-streaming systems.

Responsibilities

Embed with a team and improve the reliability, performance, and scalability of its systems, including by writing code.
Investigate anomalies in traffic, latency, errors, and cost within the team’s systems and across team boundaries; trace issues to root cause across services, storage, and clients.
Connect operational signals to business impact, including identifying which degradations affect which cohorts and which can safely be left alone.
Work on high-risk areas including payments, live video, search, the bidding path, and security.
Eliminate production scale bottlenecks and address underlying classes of problems rather than only individual instances.
Prepare for peak events through capacity modeling, load testing, and failure drills.
Improve observability so anomalies can be identified more quickly.
Develop and prove out AI applications for operations, including anomaly detection, on-call assistance, remediation, and toil reduction.
Share on-call duties with the embedded team and act as an escalation point for live production incidents.
Lead incident response for complex cross-team failures and drive the resulting systemic fixes.

Benefits

Flexible time-off policy and company-wide holidays, including spring and winter breaks.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance options.
Work-from-home support.
Home-office setup allowance.
Monthly cell phone and internet allowance.
Care benefits.
Monthly wellness allowance.
Annual childcare allowance.
Lifetime family-planning benefit, such as adoption or fertility expenses.
401(k) offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US, with employer matching up to 4% of base salary, and international pension plans.
Monthly allowance to use Whatnot as a buyer and seller.
16 weeks of paid parental leave and one month of gradual return to work; company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements, which take precedence.