Software Engineer, Infrastructure

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, and Poland, 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 at Whatnot. In this role, you will build distributed systems, services, and frameworks that improve the reliability of the entire platform. You will focus on making reliability a built-in property of our systems as scale, traffic, and complexity continue to grow.

As a senior individual contributor, you will design, build, and operate reliability-focused components, services, and frameworks, while also shaping the standards and practices that guide how software is built and run across Whatnot. You will partner closely with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to embed reliability concerns into system design, development workflows, and runtime behavior.

You will work on problems like:

• Designing and building distributed systems, services, and frameworks that support reliability, resiliency, and safe operation at scale

• Designing and operating traffic control mechanisms, including circuit breakers, rate limiting, admission control, backpressure, and graceful degradation

• Building and evolving load testing frameworks and infrastructure that validate system behavior under sustained, burst, and peak event traffic patterns

• Building chaos and resilience testing frameworks and infrastructure to proactively surface failure modes and validate recovery behavior

• Build systems that enable teams to define and implement SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets that guide them toward the right reliability tradeoffs

• Developing reliability tooling and services that improve incident detection, response, and automated mitigation

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

• Participating in incident response and identifying opportunities to reduce repeated failure patterns through systemic fixes

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.

International:

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our Kraków, Poland hub.

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that embodying a low ego, growth mindset, and high-impact drive goes a long way here.

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer working on large scale distributed systems

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

• Experience with one or more of the following areas:

  • Traffic control mechanisms such as circuit breakers and rate limiting

  • Building or operating load testing and chaos testing frameworks

  • Hands on experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging production systems

  • Direct experience working with 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

• Please find our Whatnot Candidate Privacy Notice here.

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.