Lead Backend Engineer - Customer Experience Platform

🚀 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

We’re looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to join the Customer Experience Platform team and help us build a world-class Customer Support platform. With Whatnot’s rapid growth comes a high volume of complex support needs—spanning technical, purchasing, and logistics issues for both buyers and sellers. Our team is responsible for resolving them quickly, reliably, and with high customer satisfaction.

As a member of the team, you’ll build new user-facing experiences, scale internal infrastructure, and design intelligent AI-powered automations to help us solve thousands of customer issues per hour.

You’ll lead solutions end to end. You’ll translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical solutions and drive delivery and experimentation. Your role will involve creative problem-solving to balance development speed, product impact, and technical excellence.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, or New York hubs.

👋 You

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego and a growth mindset, while leaning into action, details, and impact goes a long way here.

As our next Backend Engineer, you should have 5+ years of full-time software engineering experience in high growth startups, plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.

• Backend Expertise: Proven track record of building end-to-end product experiences and scaling high-scale backend systems. Experience with Python, Elixir, and/or Postgres is a plus. Experience with Python, Elixir, and/or Postgres is a plus.

• Ownership Mindset: Own projects holistically from inception to production and beyond. You are known for shipping high-quality products and platform level initiatives fast.

• Product Instinct: Excel at translating user needs to effective technical solutions.

• Problem Solving: Thrive in ambiguity and tackle challenging problems with creativity and autonomy.

• Team Leadership: Proactively improve the team environment and foster inclusive, supportive team culture.

🎁 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.

💛 EOE

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.