Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Whatnot is a live shopping platform building systems for sellers and buyers across a large-scale commerce marketplace. The Staff Software Engineer, Ads will lead the architecture and implementation of advertising auction infrastructure, including bidding, pricing, pacing, ranking, forecasting, and real-time decision-making. The role partners with product, machine learning, and infrastructure teams while driving foundational projects, technical strategy, reliability, and engineering quality.
Responsibilities
- Architect and lead the implementation of high-throughput, low-latency backend systems that power ad auctions, bidding, pacing, ranking, and delivery
- Design auction mechanisms that balance seller value, buyer experience, marketplace efficiency, and long-term ecosystem health
- Build foundational services for budget management, allocation, forecasting, experimentation, attribution, and measurement
- Develop reliable integrations between real-time auction services, machine learning models, data pipelines, and marketplace systems
- Own the performance, resilience, observability, and scalability of critical services throughout their production lifecycle
- Define service contracts, architectural patterns, fault-isolation strategies, and capacity plans for systems used by multiple product teams
- Lead technical decisions for new auction and monetization capabilities, including how experiments graduate into durable platform infrastructure
- Partner with product and machine learning teams to translate marketplace problems into practical backend and algorithmic solutions
- Lead design and code reviews, mentor senior engineers, and raise the engineering bar across system design, testing, deployment, and operations
- Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems for critical production systems
- Develop the technical roadmap for auction infrastructure and connect foundational investments to measurable seller, buyer, and marketplace outcomes
Skills
- • 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 mastery of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, state management, etc
- • Deep experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink, etc.)
- • Strong software design, algorithmic, and data-structure skills
- • Proficiency in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Go) and scripting
- • Experience with messaging, caches (e.g., Redis, RocksDB), time-series stores, and data pipelines
- • Proven track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, especially in an ads, ranking, or ML serving context
- • Excellent communication skills, ability to influence cross-organizational stakeholders
- • Proven track record of delivering features end-to-end and can ship products and features lightning-fast without sacrificing quality
- • Strong ownership instincts — capable of driving projects from inception to production and beyond
- • The ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly
- • Startup experience at a high-growth company — working in fast-paced, rapidly evolving product environments with frequent experimentation (nice to have)
- • Experience with ads systems (bidding, auction, attribution, measurement, etc.), infrastructure, and international commerce (nice to have)
Benefits
- Offers Equity
- Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
- Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
- Work From Home Support
- Home office setup allowance
- Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet
- Care benefits
- Monthly allowance for wellness
- Annual allowance towards Childcare
- Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
- Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
- Monthly allowance to dogfood the app
- Parental Leave
- 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work; company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.
Company Overview
Company H1B Sponsorship