Whatnot
Staff Production Engineer
$245K–$290K
San Francisco, CA +3 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 26, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
New York, NY
Los Angeles, CA
Seattle, WA - Experience
- 9+ years building and debugging production services at scale; backgrounds may include software engineering, production engineering, SRE, or systems engineering.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
About the job
Embed with engineering teams to find and fix production reliability, performance, scalability, and operational issues across Whatnot’s live commerce platform.
What you'll do
- Write code to improve embedded teams’ systems and trace anomalies to root cause across services, storage, and clients.
- Prepare for peak events with capacity modeling, load testing, and failure drills; improve observability and remove recurring bottlenecks.
- Share on-call, lead response to complex incidents, and apply AI to anomaly detection, on-call assistance, remediation, and toil reduction.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- 9+ years building and debugging production services at scale.
- Strong systems and distributed systems fundamentals, plus depth in observability and production debugging.
- Fluency across languages and technologies; comfort with cloud-native environments such as AWS or GCP with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code.
Nice to have
- Experience in capacity and performance engineering, load and resilience testing, incident command, or large-scale migrations under production constraints.
- Experience with high-traffic, real-time, event-driven, or live streaming systems.
Pay
$245K - $290K (base salary)
Tools
AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Python, Elixir, Go, Linux
AI focus
Apply AI to operational anomaly detection, on-call assistance, remediation, and toil reduction.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative