Whatnot

Whatnot

Software Engineer, Data Platform

San Francisco, CA · Senior · Full-time

Sponsorship not specifiedDetected 155 days ago
PythonDistributed SystemsData StructuresAlgorithmsBigQuerySnowflakeRedshiftAWSGCPTerraformKafkaMachine LearningData EngineeringCommunication

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odds of building a lasting career here

40Risky
Cap-exempt (no lottery)0
Sponsors this role90
Entry-level history0
PERM / green-card track0
Lottery odds40
Fits your clock70

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Employer immigration record

from this employer's Department of Labor filings

Green-card filing pattern in this occupation

Context, not a finding about this posting: of this employer's 3 green-card filings in this occupation, 100% were for a worker who already held the job.

Green-card intent detected

Whatnot Inc. obtained a prevailing wage determination for Data Scientists in Culver City, CALIFORNIA on 2026-06-08. No matching green-card filing appears in our data yet. The determination expires in 0 days (2026-09-05), and a green-card filing must follow before then or the employer starts over.

Green-card follow-through: 80%

Of 5 labor certifications old enough to have been used, 1 expired without the employer filing the next step. Median time from filing to decision: 508 days.100% of their filings were for a worker who already held the job.Only certifications past the 180-day window are counted — recent ones cannot have expired yet.

Files H-1B transfers

25 transfer filings in the last year, covering 25 workers. Median labor-condition decision: 7 days. An employer that already files transfers is one that can take over an existing H-1B.

Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.

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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.

Responsibilities

  • Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next-generation capabilities at Whatnot
  • Lead the buildout and evolution of our Flink platform, helping drive stream processing from early platform investment to production-ready usage across the company.
  • Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant streaming infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of an existing platform.
  • Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for stream processing systems.
  • Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and then partner cross-functionally to bring that architecture to life
  • Track record of building scalable, high-performance distributed systems
  • Experience building multi-tenant or end-to-end streaming infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases.
  • Work From Home Support

Nice to have

  • Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production
  • Strong experience with streaming data systems such as Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar, with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself - not just downstream pipelines.
  • Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful real-time data pipelines at scale, including concepts like checkpointing, state management, and watermarking.
  • Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in stream processing systems, including when Flink is the right solution and when it is not.
  • Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) for processing and serving data products
  • Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management
  • Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (for example, Terraform)
  • Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles

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

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 Data Platform team at Whatnot builds services that improve our core product experience and unlock meaningful business value.
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This listing is sourced directly from Whatnot's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.