Staff Software Engineer, Ads

Whatnot is a live shopping and commerce platform. The Ads team is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to shape the technical foundation of its advertising marketplace by designing and operating auction, bidding, pricing, pacing, ranking, forecasting, and real-time decision-making systems. The role leads foundational backend and algorithmic projects, partners across product, machine learning, and infrastructure, and mentors engineers while ensuring system reliability and scalability.

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

Requirements:

• 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)