Software Engineer, Infrastructure

🚀 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 

We're looking for software engineers to join our Infrastructure Reliability Engineering team. In this role, you will build the distributed systems, services, and frameworks that make reliability a built-in property of the Whatnot platform. As scale, traffic, and complexity continue to grow, you will ensure our systems stay ahead of that curve.

Whatnot's backend is built primarily in Python and Elixir, with Go used for performance-sensitive infrastructure components. You'll work across these languages depending on the problem, and we value engineers who are comfortable learning new stacks over those who are deep in only one.

This is systems engineering work. You'll design and build components that sit in the critical path of Whatnot's traffic, testing infrastructure that validates system behavior before and during peak events, and developer-facing frameworks that raise the reliability floor across the entire platform. You will partner closely with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to embed reliability into system design, development workflows, and runtime behavior.


YOU WILL WORK ON PROBLEMS LIKE:

- Designing and building distributed systems that support reliability, resiliency, and safe operation at scale

- Designing and operating traffic control mechanisms: circuit breakers, rate limiting, admission control, backpressure, and graceful degradation

- Building and evolving load testing frameworks that validate system behavior under sustained, burst, and peak event traffic patterns

- Building chaos and resilience testing infrastructure to proactively surface failure