Infrastrucuture Engineer, Traffic

🚀 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. 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. 💻 Role We're looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own the path between Whatnot's customers and our code. The Traffic team owns every hop along that path: the edge, DNS, private connectivity, the service mesh, TLS, and internal access. We make it fast, reliable, and secure by default, so product engineers ship globally without thinking about the network. You'll partner closely with Reliability and Platform Engineering to get observability right. Network problems are only debuggable if the data already exists when the incident starts, so you'll work with those teams to instrument every layer of a request, land those signals in the tooling engineers already use, and make "is it the network?" a question answered with evidence in minutes instead of debated for hours. You'll work with Security just as closely on how traffic enters, leaves, and moves inside our perimeter. This is a hands-on, software-first role rather than a network administration one. You'll write controllers, extensions, and automation, and the bar for success is that other engineers stop needing to think about the layer you own. Our surface area covers the full journey of a request, and you will work across most of it: Shape how traffic reaches us at the edge, from caching and security posture to the routing decisions that determine how fast Whatnot feels in each part of the world Build and scale the private connectivity that carries traffic between our services, accounts, and clusters, and keep it secure as the topology grows Push our service proxy and mesh layer further, tuning it for the traffic patterns we actually have and extending it when the off-the-shelf configuration stops being enough Keep name resolution, TLS, and internal access boring, and automated, to the engineers who depend on them Make the network legible. Every layer of a request should be instrumented well enough that "is it the network?" gets answered with evidence in minutes instead of debated for hours Design for the failure cases first. Network changes carry enormous blast radius, so you will build tooling that makes correct changes easy and dangerous ones hard, and rehearse failover before we need it 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 Seattle or San Francisco hub. 👋 You People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 7+ years of professional software engineering experience preferably running the network behind high-traffic applications. Have deep, hands-on experience (3+ years) with Istio and Envoy.