[Hiring] Software Engineer @Whatnot

Role Description

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.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of total software engineering experience.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Economics, a related technical 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, focused on driving value for users & a track record of deploying simple solutions wherever feasible.
• Relentlessness & entrepreneurship, prioritizing work ruthlessly & running through walls to get things done.
• 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.

Company Description

Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love. We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes.