Software Engineer, Infrastructure

Job Overview

🚀 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 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

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 modes and validate recovery behavior


• Building systems that enable teams to define and implement SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to guide reliability tradeoffs


• Developing tooling that improves incident detection, response, and automated mitigation


• Reviewing service architectures with a focus on failure modes, scalability limits, and operational safety


• Participating in incident response and driving systemic fixes that reduce repeated failure patterns

This is a highly visible role. The Reliability team provides foundational systems and frameworks that allow Whatnot to scale rapidly while remaining stable and trustworthy for buyers and sellers.

About 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.

• 5+ years of experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems. Experience in Python, Elixir, or Go is preferred, but strong engineers from other backend stacks who are eager to learn are welcome.


• You identify as a software engineer first. You want to build systems and write code, not just configure infrastructure or respond to pages.


• Strong fundamentals in designing, building, and operating shared production services and frameworks.


• Experience with one or more of the following:


• Traffic control mechanisms such as circuit breakers and rate limiting


• Building or operating load testing and chaos testing frameworks


• Hands-on observability, monitoring, and debugging of production systems


• SLOs, error budgets, and incident response processes


• Comfortable in cloud-native environments such as AWS or GCP with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code.


• Strong collaborator with clear written and verbal communication skills.


• Bonus: experience with high-traffic, real-time, or event-driven systems.


• Bonus: experience building developer-facing tools, frameworks, or platform libraries consumed by other engineering teams.

EOE

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.