Whatnot

Whatnot

Engineering Manager, Orders Platform

New York, NY · Senior

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 42 days ago
PythonElixirPlatform EngineeringIncident ResponseLeadershipCommunicationProblem Solving

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.

Responsibilities

  • Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for systems that support hundreds of millions of orders globally, from creation through post-fulfillment.
  • Own building and operations for our global Orders Platform, a business-critical area at the center of buyer, seller, and internal operational workflows.
  • Own the core order lifecycle across live and async channels, ensuring orders can be created, completed, and recovered reliably.
  • Partner with senior engineers across Payments, Marketplace and Fraud teams on technical direction, staying close enough to challenge designs, make trade-offs, and keep the team focused on the right architecture.
  • Drive reliability and scale across the architecture.
  • Ensure customer experiences are amazing and helpful and maintain a high bar for correctness in recovery, refunds, cancellations, and terminal-state handling.
  • Partner closely with CX, Seller, Marketing, Finance, Tax, and admin surface owners on the internal tooling and workflows that depend on Orders Platform.
  • Maintain strong operating mechanisms for the team: planning, execution visibility, on-call, incident response, rollout discipline, and accountability for production behavior.
  • Strong technical judgment. You should be able to challenge designs, understand failure modes, and guide good engineering trade-offs.
  • Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers while building a transparent, accountable, and collaborative team culture.

Requirements

  • Experience with complex order, transaction, or workflow-heavy systems, including state machines, asynchronous processing, or distributed jobs.

Nice to have

  • Whatnot's backend runs on Python and Elixir, with Go used for performance-sensitive components.
  • Direct experience with any of these is a plus
  • equally strong candidates from other modern backend stacks who are eager to learn are welcome.

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

Company info

  • Whatnot is the largest live shopping platform in North America and Europe to buy, sell, and discover the things you love.
  • Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories.
  • We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy.
  • The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.
  • 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.
  • We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.
  • Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news and engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
  • The Orders Platform team, within Whatnot's Payments org, builds and operates the core infrastructure that powers order creation, payment processing, and order lifecycle management across the marketplace.
  • As we continue to scale, we're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead a team responsible for ensuring these mission-critical systems remain reliable, resilient, and highly scalable, enabling millions of transactions to move seamlessly from purchase through fulfillment.
  • Strong experience in backend or platform engineering, along with experience managing engineering teams in fast-moving environments.
  • A track record operating high-scale systems where reliability, correctness, and user trust matter.

This listing is sourced directly from Whatnot's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.