🚀 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. We’re re-defining e-commerce by blending community, shopping, and entertainment into a community just for you. As a remote co-located team, we’re inspired by innovation and anchored in our values https://www.whatnot.com/careers. With hubs in the US, UK, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Australia, we’re building the future of online marketplaces –together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to collectibles like trading cards, comic books, and even live plants, our live auctions have something for everyone.

And we’re just getting started! As one of the fastest growing marketplaces https://a16z.com/marketplace-100/, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. Check out the latest Whatnot updates on our news https://blog.teamwhatnot.com/ and engineering https://medium.com/whatnot-engineering blogs and join us as we enable anyone to turn their passion into a business, and bring people together through commerce.

💻 ROLE

This is not a traditional SRE or DevOps role. Whatnot's Reliability Engineering team is a software engineering team that builds the distributed systems, frameworks, and developer-facing tools that make reliability a built-in property of the platform. Think of it as platform engineering for reliability: the team designs and ships software that other engineers use every day to build, test, and operate their services with confidence.

As a senior leader in our Infrastructure organization, you will own the technical direction and execution of the Reliability Engineering team. The team's mandate spans SLOs, observability, load testing, resilience testing, incident response, and traffic control mechanisms. You will partner closely with engineering teams across the company to define reliability standards, accelerate detection and mitigation of issues, and ensure Whatnot's systems remain reliable, scalable, and performant as we grow.
This role carries significant leadership scope. Depending on the candidate, this person may also take on responsibilities as the Infrastructure engineering lead for Poland and a broader site leadership role for Whatnot Poland, either immediately or as the Poland presence scales.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and mentor a team of highly skilled software engineers, supporting their technical growth, execution, and long-term career development.

• Set technical direction and quality standards for the team while empowering senior ICs to own design and architecture decisions. Roll up your sleeves when needed and course-correct when technical decisions are heading in the wrong direction.

• Develop and execute the strategic roadmap for reliability engineering at Whatnot.

• Build and operationalize best practices that empower product and platform teams to design and run reliable systems, incorporating SLOs, monitoring standards, and incident response patterns into their development workflows.

• Own the strategic roadmap for reliability tooling, including incident response systems, SLO measurement platforms, and developer-facing reliability libraries, while partnering with senior engineers on architecture and design.

• Lead the team in designing and building traffic control systems (distributed semaphores, rate limiting, circuit breaking) as reusable platform components consumed across Whatnot's service fleet.

• Lead the design and execution of load testing at scale, validating resilience against sustained and bursty growth scenarios, and providing tooling that enables teams to contribute new load test scenarios.

• Drive continuous improvement in incident detection and mitigation, including early warning systems and foundational observability instrumentation.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to influence product and architectural decisions that improve overall reliability and customer impact.

• Partner with Infrastructure and Engineering leadership to shape reliability strategy and investment priorities across the organization.

• Build a culture of learning and continuous improvement through blameless incident analysis, proactive reliability investment, and systematic reduction of repeated failure patterns.

• Scale the team through hiring, mentorship, leadership development, and thoughtful organizational design.

👋 YOU

In addition to embodying our cultural principles https://www.whatnot.com/careers#:~:text=time%20and%20schedule.-,Our%20Principles,-Be%20part%20of, great candidates will also have:

• 10+ years of industry experience, ideally including infrastructure or platform engineering, with 5+ years managing engineering teams. Experience leading managers or multiple teams is a plus.

• You see reliability engineering as a software engineering discipline, not an operations function. You're energized by building tools and systems that scale impact across an engineering organization.

• Proven track record building and operating large-scale distributed systems with strong reliability, observability, and incident response practices.

• Deep technical grounding in one or more of: SLO design, monitoring/alerting, incident tooling, traffic control mechanisms, load and chaos testing, or platform engineering.

• Experience leading teams that ship developer-facing platforms, frameworks, or internal tools, not just operate infrastructure.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals with a passion for improving engineering practices across an organization.

• Demonstrated ability to guide teams through complex system challenges, large-scale migrations, and longer-term reliability initiatives.

• Exceptional communication and leadership skills, with the ability to influence technical direction across teams and organizations.

• A passion for enabling teams to build fast while building safely through well-designed tooling and proactive detection mechanisms.

• Experience leading multiple teams, managing managers, or serving as a site lead is a plus.

💛 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.