Engineering Manager, Buyer

🚀 Join the Future of Commerce with Whatnot!

Whatnot is the largest livestream 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.

We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. 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.

💻 Role 

Buyer Engineering owns the end-to-end buyer experience on Whatnot, from acquiring and onboarding new users to driving long-term engagement and retention. The org builds systems across discovery, personalization, incentives, and customer support to help buyers find content, stay active, and have a high-quality experience.

The Customer Experience team focuses on the support experience for buyers and sellers when something goes wrong, plus the tooling that powers that support. It's critical for Whatnot’s rapid growth as support volume rose by 6x last year alone. Within CX, we are scaling a brand new initiative—Seller Provided Support—an end to end product which allows sellers to solve buyer’s post-purchase issues. SPS is the top priority: it builds seller ⇄ buyer trust and reduces one of our largest operating expenses — refunds.

You will own scaling SPS to all Whatnot sellers, leading a full-stack team at the intersection of high business impact, technical complexity, and excellent product UX. Partnering closely with Product, Design, and platform teams, you’ll lead the design of scalable systems integrating with messaging, payments, and logistics, and build the intelligent tooling sellers need to resolve post-purchase issues.

This role is end-to-end: you’ll own business outcomes, technical strategy, and execution to a cohesive UX experience. Success looks like wide SPS adoption, measurable refund rate reduction, strong CSAT, and a growing team delivering with speed and quality. This role can expand broadly across CX as we build a world-class, intelligent support platform for one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the US.

We offer flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles or Seattle hub.

👋 You 

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they're building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.

In addition to embodying our cultural principles, great leadership candidates will also have:

• 8+ years in product or platform engineering, with 3+ years managing teams (6–12 engineers).

• Product development leadership: Proven track record of building high-impact, end-to-end product experiences and scaling backend systems.

• Product instinct: Ability to translate strategic user and business problems into robust technical systems and delightful product experiences.

• Builder mindset: Able to act as the team’s technical lead when needed — lead system design, make pragmatic trade-offs, and drive holistic execution.

• Team leadership: Track record of growing engineering teams that deliver complex, large-scale products with speed and quality.

• Ownership & execution: Owns outcomes end-to-end, thrives in ambiguity, and unblocks the team across business, technical, and operational challenges.

• Nice to have (optional): Experience with messaging systems, or support platforms; familiarity with Python/Elixir/Postgres.

🎁 Benefits 

• Flexible Time off Policy and Company-wide Holidays (including a spring and winter break)

• Health Insurance options including Medical, Dental, Vision

• Work From Home Support

  • Home office setup allowance

  • Monthly allowance for cell phone and internet

• Care benefits

  • Monthly allowance for wellness

  • Annual allowance towards Childcare

  • 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

• Monthly allowance to dogfood the app

  • All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!).

• Parental Leave

  • 16 weeks of paid parental leave + one month gradual return to work *company leave allowances run concurrently with country leave requirements which take precedence.

💛 EOE

Whatnot is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We value diversity, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, parental status, disability status, or any other status protected by local law. We believe that our work is better and our company culture is improved when we encourage, support, and respect the different skills and experiences represented within our workforce.