Staff Software Engineer, Discovery 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. 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 Discovery shapes what buyers see when they open Whatnot, from the For You feed and search results to recommended live shows and listings. Discovery Platform builds the systems that make those experiences possible. Our team owns search infrastructure on OpenSearch, a low-latency feature and key-value serving layer, the retrieval framework that assembles feeds, and the pipelines that keep our indices fresh. Teams across Discovery and beyond rely on these systems to build and ship products. We're hiring a Staff Software Engineer to lead technical work across Discovery Platform and product-facing retrieval and recommendations. You'll spend roughly 60% of your time strengthening the platform's capacity, reliability, and shared building blocks, and 40% partnering with ranking and machine learning engineers to bring new discovery experiences to buyers. You'll join a small team of senior backend engineers who own their systems from design through production and on-call. This is a high-impact, hands-on role for someone who finds the most important problems in ambiguous spaces, creates a path forward, and builds solutions that improve both the buyer experience and the pace at which other teams can ship. What You’ll Do: Design and evolve search and serving infrastructure that performs reliably through live shopping traffic spikes, including our largest sales events. Build retrieval systems that let feed and search teams add candidate sources safely and quickly. Partner with ranking and machine learning engineers to bring models and features into production with the latency and freshness they need. Set technical direction for Discovery Platform and influence roadmaps across partner teams, using data and product outcomes to guide decisions. Own complex systems end to end, from architecture and implementation through production operations and on-call. Raise the engineering bar through hands-on contributions, design and code reviews, and mentorship. 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 New York City, San Francisco, or Seattle 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. As our next Staff Software Engineer, you likely have: A bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience, including building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production. A track record of leading substantial technical initiatives across teams, defining problems clearly, aligning partners, and shipping solutions through ambiguity. Experience designing