Engineering Manager, Infrastructure Engineering

🚀 JOIN THE FUTURE OF COMMERCE WITH WHATNOT!

Whatnot is the largest livestream 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 https://www.whatnot.com/careers 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 https://a16z.com/marketplace-100/ and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America http://google.com/search?q=%231+forbes+startup+employer&oq=%231+forbes+startup+employer&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg9MgYIAhBFGD0yBggDEEUYQDIGCAQQRRhAMgYIBRBFGEDSAQg1NzM0ajBqMagCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news https://blog.teamwhatnot.com/ and engineering blogs https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.


💻 ROLE 

This is not a traditional SRE or DevOps role. Whatnot's Reliability Engineering team is a software engineering team that builds the distributed systems, frameworks, and developer-facing tools that make reliability a built-in property of the platform. Think of it as platform engineering for reliability: the team designs and ships software that other engineers use every day to build, test, and operate their services with confidence.

As a senior leader in our Infrastructure organization, you will own the technical direction and execution of the Reliability Engineering team. The team's mandate spans SLOs, observability, load testing, resilience testing, incident response, and traffic control mechanisms. You will partner closely with engineering teams across the company to define reliability standards, accelerate detection and mitigation of issues, and ensure Whatnot's systems remain reliable, scalable, and performant as we grow.
This role carries significant leadership scope. Depending on the candidate, this person may also take on responsibilities as the Infrastructure engineering lead for Poland and a broader site leadership role for Whatnot Poland, either immediately or as the Poland presence scales.

Responsibilities:

- Lead and mentor a team of highly skilled software engineers, supporting their technical growth, execution, and long-term career development.

- Set technical direction and quality standards for the team while empowering senior ICs to own design and architecture decisions. Roll up your sleeves when needed and course-correct when technical decisions are heading in t