Senior Staff Software Engineer

Whatnot is a live shopping platform where sellers buy, sell, and discover products across hundreds of categories. The Senior Staff Software Engineer operates at cross-organizational scope, driving technical strategy, building durable systems and engineering patterns, identifying systemic risks, and shaping engineering culture through mentorship and collaboration.

Responsibilities:

• Drive cross-org technical impact by creating capabilities that don't yet exist, measured by movement in company-level metrics and the durability of the systems you leave behind
• Establish technical direction that holds across org boundaries, through strategy docs, RFCs, and architecture reviews, reducing the need for repeated alignment and enabling teams to make good decisions independently
• Spot systemic risks and opportunities others miss, positioning multiple orgs to respond before problems become crises, by staying close to the business and maintaining deep context across domains
• Build patterns and frameworks that become engineering defaults, measured by adoption across teams and the degree to which they enable others to move faster without sacrificing quality
• Steward the health of multiple systems and guide their evolution, balancing short-term pragmatism with long-term architectural integrity
• Shape engineering culture and grow the people around you through mentorship, internal collaboration, external speaking, and investing in new programs or processes that help scale Whatnot engineering

Requirements:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including a track record of cross-org technical leadership at consumer scale
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
• Deep mastery in one or more technical domains, you're the go-to expert for the hardest questions, and you stay hands-on enough to maintain credibility and exercise judgment
• A proven track record of cross-org impact, not just excellent work within a team, but influence that changed how multiple teams build, operate, or think
• Strong technical judgment: the ability to challenge designs, identify failure modes, make principled trade-offs, and know when to take shortcuts and when to harden systems
• Experience building systems and patterns that outlast individual ownership, foundations others build on, not solutions that require the original author to maintain
• Experience delivering on complex, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives, shipping consistently despite unclear requirements, misaligned stakeholders, or missing support
• A collaborative, low-ego approach, giving credit freely, resolving cross-org conflicts productively, and advocating for the less-recognized
• Experience at consumer scale, high-traffic, high-reliability systems where correctness, performance, and user trust all matter
• You've identified duplication or fragmentation across teams and built a shared solution that preserved autonomy while accelerating everyone
• You've written an RFC or strategy doc that changed how an org thought about a problem, and then stayed accountable for the outcome
• You've stepped outside your domain to unblock a critical initiative because it needed to get done
• You use Whatnot as a buyer or seller and can speak to the product with real context
• You've mentored engineers who went on to operate at a higher level than they would have otherwise