Software Engineer, Safety Experience

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.

As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.

We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. 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.

💻 Role

Safety XP sits at an intersection of real time auctions, transactions and video, all happening at once. This team decides what can be sold, to whom, and where and what happens the moment something goes wrong. Some of what you'll dig into:

• Giving people real control over their accounts, enforced in the moment, not on a delay.

• Navigating a genuinely complex global regulatory landscape, where the rules of what's sellable change by country and by season.

• Building the backbone that both "here's why this got flagged" and "here's why this got blocked" run on, the kind of system every other safety feature ends up depending on.

• Working shoulder-to-shoulder with leadership to decide and deliver what’s right for the end users.

You'll own genuinely varied problems, not one narrow project, and you'll be in the room for how they get solved on every platform, not just the API layer.

What you'll do:

• Design and develop systems to protect the platform: Build and iterate on production algorithms and infrastructures that mitigate systemic risks and safeguard buyers, sellers, and the broader Whatnot community.

• Balance risk and user experience: Proactively monitor the impact of protective systems on trusted users, ensuring interventions deliver more value than friction.

• Respond in real time to threats: Architect event-driven pipelines and detection frameworks that enable near real-time responses to high-risk user behavior.

• Contribute across the full development lifecycle: Engage in ideation, scoping, prototyping, load testing, deployment, and monitoring to deliver resilient and scalable solutions.

• Drive cross-team initiatives: Collaborate across multiple product surfaces and operational teams, surfacing insights to leadership and stakeholders through dashboards, notebooks, and clear written documentation.

• Continuously evolve defenses: Stay ahead of emerging abuse patterns, abuse vectors, and account integrity risks by iterating quickly and rigorously testing solutions.

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our New York, Los Angeles or Seattle hub.

👋 You

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.

As our next Software Engineer you should have 4+ years of software engineering experience , plus:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent work experience..

• Business intuition & a data-driven mindset that enables you to think critically about the growth headwinds abuse prevention systems can create. Explicit data science or machine-learning experience is a huge plus.

• Obsession with impact. You are focused on driving value for users & have a track record of deploying simple solutions wherever feasible. You move as fast as possible without sacrificing quality.

• Relentnessness & entrepreneurship. You prioritize your work ruthlessly & run through walls to get things done. Your curiosity drives you to dig into user problems & craft suggestions on how we can address them.

• Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams.

• Comfortability with data warehouses and transformation tools such as Snowflake, dbt, Dagster.

🎁 Benefits

• 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

  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).

• 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.

💛 EOE

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.