Whatnot
Staff Software Engineer, Discovery Platform
$230K–$290K
San Francisco, CA +2 · Staff · Full-time · Posted Oct 6, 2026
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
New York, NY
Seattle, WA - Experience
- 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience.
- Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
About the job
Leads technical work on discovery infrastructure and retrieval and recommendation experiences that power Whatnot’s feeds, search, and listings.
What you'll do
- Design and operate reliable, low-latency search and serving infrastructure and retrieval systems.
- Partner with ranking and machine learning engineers to productionize models and features.
- Set technical direction across teams and contribute hands-on through implementation, reviews, mentorship, and on-call.
What they ask for
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 8+ years of full-time software engineering experience, including building and operating large-scale distributed systems in production.
- Experience leading substantial technical initiatives across teams and shipping solutions through ambiguity.
- Hands-on experience with OpenSearch or Elasticsearch, Redis or Valkey, and Kafka or similar streaming systems.
Nice to have
- Experience with search or recommendations at scale.
- Experience designing backend systems such as retrieval services, event-driven systems, or streaming data pipelines.
Pay
$230K - $290K (USD; base salary or total pay not specified)
Tools
OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Redis, Valkey, Kafka
AI focus
Partners with ranking and machine learning engineers to bring models and features into production; works with recommendation systems, including candidate generation, ranking, and feature serving.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative