Software Engineer, Search & Discovery Platform

🚀 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 are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be foundational members in shaping the Discovery Platform. You will play a critical role in defining the technical direction and designing a world-class scalable Discovery system that is scalable enough to keep pace with our business growth to power feed, browse, search and taxonomy systems while catering to the unique challenges of operating a marketplace for live shopping!

Working in a highly cross functional role, you’ll make key decisions about how we integrate retrieval, ranking through machine learning, real-time and stream processing, content understanding, materialization into a highly personalized discovery experience that unlocks product iterations while providing strong reliability.

An ideal candidate will have experience building discovery backend and data systems at scale, with a knack for working closely with product engineers to solve immediate problems for our users while making right tradeoffs towards building a platform. We’ll often prototype new ideas quickly, and then need to build them for extreme scale while coordinating closely with other teams - the ideal person for this role is an expert at both of these approaches.

Learn more about the Discovery systems at Whatnot from our blog posts on Whatamix https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering/whatamix-blendable-feed-construction-2c94c21f6635, LLMs for Search https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering/enhancing-search-using-large-language-models-f9dcb988bdb9.

What you'll do:

- Build the services and infrastructure to enable advanced recommenda