Software Engineer, Data Platform

Whatnot is a live shopping platform where people buy, sell, and discover products through commerce. The Data Platform team builds services that improve the core product experience and generate business value, and this role leads the development of scalable streaming infrastructure, including the evolution of the Flink platform, real-time analytics systems, and machine learning infrastructure.

Responsibilities:

• Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next-generation capabilities at Whatnot
• Lead the buildout and evolution of our Flink platform, helping drive stream processing from early platform investment to production-ready usage across the company
• Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant streaming infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of an existing platform
• Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for stream processing systems
• Build high-quality systems that support real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and machine learning infrastructure needs across Whatnot
• Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and then partner cross-functionally to bring that architecture to life
• Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development
• Help shape broader company architecture across stream processing, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding

Requirements:

• As our next Software Engineer, Data Platform, you should have 5+ years of experience, plus:
• Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production
• Track record of building scalable, high-performance distributed systems
• Strong experience with streaming data systems such as Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar, with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself — not just downstream pipelines
• Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful real-time data pipelines at scale, including concepts like checkpointing, state management, and watermarking
• Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in stream processing systems, including when Flink is the right solution and when it is not
• Experience building multi-tenant or end-to-end streaming infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases
• Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) for processing and serving data products
• Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management
• Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (for example, Terraform)
• Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles
• Self-starter ethic, with the ability to thrive under a high level of autonomy
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills