Fullstack Engineer, Ads

Department: Engineering

Location: New York, NY, San Francisco, CA, Los Angeles, CA, Seattle, WA

Compensation: $207K – $230K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

🚀 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

Ads at Whatnot are both a growth lever for sellers and a revenue lever for Whatnot; When ads work, they earn seller trust by delivering real, incremental value - new buyers, new-to-category reach, and viewership that compounds. The team owns the end-to-end ads system: backend foundations, retrieval and ranking, UI and dashboards, logging, measurement, and more. The team is small- we expect engineers to be ready to own and lead major pieces of functionality independently. We work closely across the rest of the engineering org, including Discovery, Seller Growth, Data Platform, Machine Learning Platform, and Payments

We're hiring across the full ads stack — from engineers who go deep on backend systems and data to engineers who move fluidly across the stack into client and seller-facing surfaces. In either case, you'll own problems end to end and grow into new areas as the team scales.

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 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 Fullstack Engineer you should have 5+ years of generalist software development plus:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.

• Full-stack proficiency: You are comfortable working across the entire stack, from mobile (iOS/Android) and web to backend systems.

• Web development experience with React, using GraphQL for API development, and modern frontend applications (exposure to Next.js framework is not required but preferred).

• Backend Expertise: Proven track record of building end-to-end high-scale product experiences as a full-stack engineer. Experience with Python on backend, and/or Postgres databases is a plus.

• Excellent product instincts- you first think about users rather than the best technical solution.

• You can mentor others, and prioritize building inclusive, supportive teams.

• Project owner- you’ve strong ownership instincts and can own projects from inception to production and beyond.

• You are known for shipping products and features lightning-fast.

• You’re an excellent problem solver and can operate autonomously.

• Ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly.

• Proven track record of delivering features

🎁 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.

Please note: Whatnot will only contact you through official @whatnot.com email addresses. If you see an email impersonating a Whatnot recruiter, please disregard and report it as spam.

💛 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.