Staff Software Engineer, CX

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

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](https://www.whatnot.com/careersprinciples) 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.

We're one of the [fastest growing marketplaces](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/business/dealbook/whatnot-livestream-shopping-fundraise.html) and were recently named the [1 Best Startup Employer in America](https://www.forbes.com/lists/americas-best-startup-employers/) by Forbes. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our [news](https://blog.teamwhatnot.com/) and [engineering blogs](https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering) and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.

💻 Role

We’re looking for a Staff+ Backend Engineer to help build the systems behind a world-class Customer Experience platform at Whatnot. As Whatnot grows across buyers, sellers, markets, and support channels, our challenge is to resolve increasingly complex needs quickly and reliably—while protecting customer trust and making support scale with the business.

Our work spans support intake and routing, buyer and seller support, Seller Provided Support (SPS), refunds and returns, CX Inbox and AI-powered support. We’re building toward a more connected experience: capture context once, make it easy for the right system or person to resolve the issue, and ensure the outcome is completed and communicated across channels.

You’ll help set the technical direction for the next generation of CX systems. That includes making AI-assisted support safe and measurable; building configurable, observable, and testable automation; improving how support requests and conversations connect across surfaces; and strengthening the backend workflows that carry a case through decisions, refunds, returns, and follow-up. You’ll work across CX, Product, Operations, AI, Payments, Logistics, Trust, and other engineering teams to turn ambiguous customer and business problems into durable systems.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll lead architecture and delivery across multi-team initiatives, make thoughtful tradeoffs between near-term customer impact and long-term platform health, and raise the quality and effectiveness of the broader engineering organization.

This role is based near one of our hubs in San Francisco, New York City, or Seattle.

👋 You

Curious about who thrives at Whatnot? We’ve found that low ego and a growth mindset, while leaning into action, details, and impact, go a long way here.

As our next Staff+ Backend Engineer, you bring 9+ years of software engineering experience, including technical leadership on complex backend systems, and:

- Customer experience domain depth: Meaningful experience building customer support, service, marketplace post-purchase, or other operationally complex customer-facing systems. You understand that CX is a system of experiences, policies, workflows, and operations—not just a ticketing tool—and can bring that context to technical decisions.

- Backend systems expertise: A track record of designing, building, and operating reliable, high-scale backend services and end-to-end product experiences. Experience with Python, Elixir, and/or Postgres is useful.

- Technical strategy and architecture: Ability to identify the systems and foundationa