Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Weâre re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, weâre inspired by innovation and anchored in our values. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Australia, weâre building the future of online marketplaces âtogether.
From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.
And weâre just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces, weâre 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.
Weâre looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Developer Tools team and be a primary contributor of our AI Tooling work end-to-end. In this role, you will build and own the AI tooling that shapes how Whatnotâs engineering organizationâand increasingly, non-engineering teamsâwrite code, ship software, and operate systems faster and more effectively.
This is not a machine learning or data science role. You wonât be training modelsâyouâll be building the tooling, infrastructure, and workflows that allow AI coding agents and assistants to operate effectively within Whatnotâs codebase and processes. You should be deeply familiar with the current generation of AI development tools, especially tools provided by the big 3 LLM companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and have broad knowledge of other AI and LLM products and services.
Critically, you must be a strong software engineer first. Youâll serve as the primary interface between the Developer Tools team and Whatnotâs AI Tooling Working Groupâa cross-functional community group that tracks the bleeding-edge frontier of AI tooling. Youâll gather feedback, identify high-impact opportunities, and feed that context into the teamâs roadmap and build priorities.
Building and shipping AI tooling across the full spectrumâfrom near-term developer productivity wins to long-term autonomous agent capabilitiesâwhile helping shape what we prioritize next based on what you see working (and not working) on the ground
Designing and building sandboxed, containerized environments where AI agents can operate autonomouslyârunning code, executing tests, and iterating on solutions with appropriate guardrails
Building multi-agent orchestration systems and workflows, including CI-fixing agents, SRE context agents, and other autonomous AI capabilities that reduce toil and accelerate delivery
Enabling non-engineers (PMs, designers, operations) to leverage AI tools effectively through purpose-built workflows, onboarding experiences, and low-code/no-code interfaces
Building and optimizing AI-aware developer infrastructure: CLAUDE.md configurations, MCP servers, prompt engineering frameworks, and context management systems that make AI assistants more effective in our codebase
Deploying, monitoring, and maintaining the infrastructure supporting AI tools and workflows to ensure high availability, performance, and reliability for the organization.
Evaluating and integrating emerging AI tools and platforms as the landscape evolvesâstaying ahead of the curve and bringing the best of the ecosystem into Whatnot
This is a high-visibility, high-autonomy role. You'll have significant ownership over a space that is evolving rapidly, is a top strategic priority for Whatnot's engineering leadership, and directly shapes how our engineers work every day.
We offer flexibility to work from home or our office hub, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our Los Angeles or San Francisco hubs.
Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? Weâve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high-impact drive goes a long way here.
5+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and shipping production systems. You're a software engineer firstâbackend-leaning is fine, but you're comfortable getting around a frontend codebase too, and ideally have enough breadth across different stacks to understand what good tooling looks like beyond your home turf.
A genuine developer tooling enthusiast who's built or improved internal tools, obsessed over local dev ergonomics, or contributed to platform infrastructureâand ideally owned some of it in production. You see AI not just as autocomplete, but as a catalyst for reimagining how developers interact with their environments, codebases, and workflows.
Deeply familiar with the current generation of AI coding toolsâClaude Code (strongly preferred), Cursor, Codex, or similarâand use them to get real work done. You have strong opinions about where this space is heading and don't need to chase every new release to stay effective.
Strong product thinkingâyou can translate ambiguous problem spaces into concrete plans and prioritize across competing initiatives. Youâre comfortable writing a technical design doc and can clearly communicate what youâre building and why to people outside your team.
Clear communicator who adapts naturally to your audienceâwhether thatâs pairing with a staff engineer on an integration, onboarding a PM onto an AI workflow, or fielding questions from our VP of Engineering or CPO. The people you work with will span the full spectrum of technical ability.
Bonus: experience with agent sandboxing, containerized execution environments, multi-agent orchestration, LLM APIs and observability, prompt engineering at scale, or enabling non-technical users to leverage AI-powered workflows.
Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
Work From Home Support
Home office setup allowance
Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
Care benefits
Monthly allowance for wellness
Annual allowance towards Childcare
Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).
Parental Leave
16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allownces run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence
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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