Whatnot
Staff Software Engineer, Ads ML
$245K–$290K
New York, NY +1 · Hybrid · Staff · Full-time · Posted Sep 1, 2026
- Location
- New York, NY
Kraków, Poland - Experience
- 8+ years (for Staff) or 10+ years (for Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering experience.
- Education
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
About the job
Leads the design and delivery of scalable advertising auction infrastructure, including bidding, pricing, pacing, ranking, forecasting, and real-time ad decisions.
What you'll do
- Architect high-throughput, low-latency backend systems for auctions, ad delivery, and related services.
- Lead technical decisions and partner with product, machine learning, and infrastructure teams to build and operate reliable marketplace systems.
- Mentor engineers, guide architecture and code reviews, and own production performance, resilience, and incident response.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
- 8+ years (for Staff) or 10+ years (for Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering experience.
- Strong distributed systems, software design, algorithmic, and data-structure skills; experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing.
- Proven experience leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, especially in an ads, ranking, or ML serving context.
Nice to have
- Startup experience at a high-growth company.
- Experience with ads systems, infrastructure, and international commerce.
Pay
$245K - $290K (USD, base salary)
Tools
Kafka, Flink, Python, Go, Redis, RocksDB
AI focus
Integrates machine learning models with real-time ad auctions and builds systems for ranking, forecasting, and ML serving.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative