Whatnot
AI Tooling Engineer
San Francisco, CA · Senior
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About the role
- 🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!
- We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes.
- This is a high-velocity, high-judgment builder role.
Responsibilities
- Own ambiguous, cross-org AI bets end-to-end -identify the highest-leverage problems across the company, decide what to build, and drive it from prototype to durable production tool
- Build and ship a high volume of internal apps, prototypes, and automations -going from a vague problem to a working tool in days, then iterating with users toward production quality
- Define the reusable patterns the org builds on, including reference architectures, internal libraries, MCPs, and skills/plugins that let others move faster and safer
- Embed directly with teams across CX, Trust & Safety, Ops, and GTM to find high-leverage problems, then build the solution alongside them
- Scale the leverage -package successful builds into reusable skills and playbooks, and level up the whole company through enablement sessions, boot camps, and mentorship of other builders
- Stay ahead of the AI landscape, evaluating and bringing in new models, tools, and patterns as the ecosystem evolves, and making the build-vs-buy calls
- Deep applied-AI fluency -extensive hands-on experience building with the current generation of LLM products (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and popular agent frameworks (Cowork,
- A pattern-setter and force multiplier -you've defined how teams build, mentored other engineers, and raised the technical bar for an org, not just your own output
- A strong communicator -you can sit with non-technical users, translate their problems into software, and teach them to build for themselves
- Low ego, high agency -you see inefficiency, build the fix, and bring people along with you
Compensation
- Annual allowance towards Childcare
Benefits
- Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
- Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision
- Home office setup allowance
- Monthly allowance for wellness
- Lifetime benefit for family planning, such as adoption or fertility expenses
- Retirement; 401k offering for Traditional and Roth accounts in the US (employer match up to 4% of base salary) and Pension plans internationally
- Parental Leave
Company info
- As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia.
This listing is sourced directly from Whatnot's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.