Staff Software Engineer, Ads

🚀 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 Ads is a growing engineering team dedicated to building the systems that help Whatnot sellers grow their businesses. Our products operate at the intersection of marketplace dynamics, auction mechanics, ranking, and distributed systems. As an engineer on the Ads team, you will shape the technical foundation of Whatnot’s advertising marketplace. You’ll design auction systems that allocate limited buyer attention across sellers, balance marketplace and customer outcomes, and operate reliably at Whatnot’s scale. This includes bidding, pricing, pacing, ranking, forecasting, and real-time decision-making. This role requires strong technical judgment, comfort navigating ambiguous domains, and the autonomy to lead foundational projects from inception through production. You’ll work closely with product, machine learning, and infrastructure teams to make sound trade-offs and ship high-impact systems quickly without compromising quality. In this role, you will… Architect and lead the implementation of high-throughput, low-latency backend systems that power ad auctions, bidding, pacing, ranking, and delivery. Design auction mechanisms that balance seller value, buyer experience, marketplace efficiency, and long-term ecosystem health. Build foundational services for budget management, allocation, forecasting, experimentation, attribution, and measurement. Develop reliable integrations between real-time auction services, machine learning models, data pipelines, and marketplace systems. Own the performance, resilience, observability, and scalability of critical services throughout their production lifecycle. Define service contracts, architectural patterns, fault-isolation strategies, and capacity plans for systems used by multiple product teams. Lead technical decisions for new auction and monetization capabilities, including how experiments graduate into durable platform infrastructure. Partner with product and machine learning teams to translate marketplace problems into practical backend and algorithmic solutions. Lead design and code reviews, mentor senior engineers, and raise the engineering bar across system design, testing, deployment, and operations. Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems for critical production systems. Develop the technical roadmap for auction infrastructure and connect foundational investments to measurable seller, buyer, and marketplace outcomes. 👋 You Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high-impact drive goes a long way here. As our next Staff Software Engineer you should have: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience 8+ years (for Staff) or 10+ years (for Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering experience. Strong mastery of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, state