Software Engineer, Discovery (feed)

Whatnot · Consumer · New York, NY · Engineering

Software Engineer for Whatnot's Discovery Feed & Personalization team, focusing on building and scaling backend systems for recommendation and exploration features. The role involves shipping product features, maintaining low-latency feed experiences, enabling exploration systems for sellers, and partnering with ML teams. Requires experience in discovery-related fields and building scalable backend systems.

What you'd actually do

  1. Ship product features to deliver high-quality Discovery experiences for users
  2. Build and maintain a scalable, stable, low latency feed experience
  3. Build the services and infrastructure to enable efficient exploration systems to help small sellers and new categories grow
  4. Lead a workstream of multiple other software engineers as the individual responsible for success
  5. Partner closely across the machine learning, platform, and product engineering teams to utilize models to solve discovery problems

Skills

Required

  • 5+ years of experience
  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Software Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent work experience
  • Industry experience with a track record of applying practical methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data
  • Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams
  • Experience in discovery-related fields (e.g. Recommendations, Content Understanding, Search, etc.)
  • Expert at designing and building scalable and maintainable backend systems
  • Firm grasp of visualization tools for monitoring and logging e.g. DataDog, Grafana
  • Familiarity with cloud computing platforms and managed services such as AWS Sagemaker, Lambda, Kinesis, S3, EC2, EKS/ECS, Kafka, Flink/Spark

Nice to have

  • mentor others
  • prioritize building inclusive, supportive teams

What the JD emphasized

  • track record of shipping product features at scale
  • experience leading and delivering on cross-functional projects
  • scalable recommendation systems

Other signals

  • shipping product features at scale
  • leading and delivering on cross-functional projects
  • defining and advancing our technical approach to scalable recommendation systems