Senior Backend Engineer, Community & Live Experience

🚀 Whatnot

Whatnot (YC W20) is a livestream shopping platform and marketplace backed by Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. We’re one of YC’s top companies and one of the fastest growing marketplaces ever. We’re laser focused on creating an exceptional software company, team, and place to work.

Our mission - Enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce. We’re building the future of ecommerce; an interactive community where creators can make a living off their passion. 

Did we mention we’re high growth? In January 2021, Whatnot had 10 ambitious employees. Today, the Whatnot team is 120+ employees and will exceed 300 by year end. We’re hiring forward thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. We recruit thoughtfully, can adapt quickly, and are scaling fully remotely.

📈 Opportunity Size

The ecommerce experience has been static for 20+ years and is perhaps the largest opportunity in the startup space today. Livestream shopping is a $170B GMV market in China and has grown 100% YoY. Retail is a $5T market opportunity!

💻 The role

Community and Live Experience are at the center of what makes the engaging and safe community Whatnot users love and trust. Not only do we own the core end-to-end livestream experience for our users, we're building all kinds of social and community-driven features such as direct messaging, giveaways, gifting and more. We are a full stack product engineering team looking for capable engineers of all kinds, whether you are a generalist or product/backend engineer.

The most important qualities you'll need are making sound product decisions, navigating new domains seamlessly, taking extreme ownership, and shipping high-quality products fast. We always prioritize the highest impact features and ship them quickly. Some sample projects you might work on on Community and Live XP teams include: direct messaging, order/seller reviews, giveaways, gifting, badging, and any brand new product features and tooling that help us ensure a meaningful and fun community on Whatnot.

You'll have a lot of individual responsibility and many more freedoms, so we need to hire people we can trust. Your ability to make good trade-offs and exercise good judgment is essential to us.

👋 About You   

As our next Senior Backend Engineer, you should have 5+ years of backend or generalist software development experience in high growth startups, plus:

• You can write code - experience programming in a professional setting (we primarily use Python, Elixir, JavaScript - knowledge of these in particular not required).
• Excellent product instincts. You first think about users rather than the best technical solution.
• You’re an excellent problem solver, and can ship features fast.
• You’re open to doing frontend work when required.
• Ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly/
• Proven track record of delivering features. 

🎁 Benefits

• Competitive base salary and stock options
• Unlimited Vacation Policy and Company-wide Holidays (including a spring and winter break)
• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, Short term disability & Long term Disability
  • Whatnot covers 99% of employee premium costs, and 75% of dependent care premiums for Medical
  • Dental and Vision sponsored 100% by Whatnot for employees and dependents
• Work From Home Support
  • Laptop provided by Whatnot and home office setup allowance
  • $450 work-from-anywhere quarterly allowance for cell phone, internet, or co-working space
• Up to $500 monthly to spend within Whatnot App
• Care benefits
  • $1,350 quarterly allowance on food
  • $1,500 quarterly allowance for wellness
  • 16 weeks Paid Parental Leave and gradual return to work
  • $20,000 for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses

💛 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.