Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Australia, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together.
From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.
And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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