About the company
Whatnot is a livestream shopping platform and marketplace backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and CapitalG. Weāre building the future of ecommerce, bringing together community, shopping and entertainment. We are committed to our values, and as a remote-first team, we operate out of hubs within the US, Canada, UK, and Germany today. Weāre innovating in the fast-paced world of live auctions in categories including sports, fashion, video games, and streetwear. The platform couples rigorous seller vetting with a focus on community to create a welcoming space for buyers and sellers to share their passions with others.
Job Summary
You
šCurious about who thrives at Whatnot? Weāve found that low ego, a growth mindset, and bias into action goes a long way here. šAs our next member of the team, you should have 5+ years of experience, plus: šFocused expertise in information retrieval technologies such as search and vector databases and the ingest and serving pipelines to scale them šOperational knowledge of scaling indices and nearest neighbor algorithms šSuccessfully set the technical vision and direction of an end to end retrieval system šDeep understanding of ElasticSearch/OpenSearch/SOLR including its internals such as Apache Lucene and its custom domain specific language and query engines šTrack record of building scalable and performant distributed systems
In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:
šExperience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (e.g. Terraform). šProficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles. šSelf-starter ethic, thriving under a high level of autonomy. šExceptional interpersonal and communication skills.
