Whatnot

Staff Software Engineer – Ads, Promos

Whatnot

full-time

Posted on:

Location Type: Remote

Location: Remote • 🇵🇱 Poland

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Job Level

Lead

Tech Stack

Distributed SystemsGoKafkaPythonRedis

About the role

  • Architect, design, and lead the implementation of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems that power ad delivery, ranking, signal pipelines, and attribution.
  • Own core foundational services (e.g., storage, attribution, streaming pipelines, APIs) and drive their evolution, performance tuning, resilience, and scalability.
  • Define and enforce architectural patterns, service contracts, fault-isolation, and capacity planning across teams that build on top of the Ads Foundation stack.
  • Lead cross-functional initiatives to integrate new ad features or experiments into the foundational layers without sacrificing performance or safety.
  • Mentor and guide senior engineers, lead code reviews, design reviews, and promote best practices in system design, testing, observability, and deployment.
  • Participate in incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-mortem processes for critical system failures.
  • Evangelize reliability, scalability, and simplicity across product-oriented ad teams; drive technical roadmap, trade-offs, and de-risking strategies.
  • Understand our buyer and seller experiences and become an expert in helping them effectively scale their business through ads & monetization products.

Requirements

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience
  • 8+ years (for Staff) or 10+ years (for Senior Staff) of backend/distributed systems engineering experience.
  • Strong mastery of distributed systems fundamentals: consensus, partitioning, replication, coordination, sharding, state management, etc.
  • Deep experience with high-throughput, low-latency services and stream processing (e.g., Kafka, Flink, etc.).
  • Strong software design, algorithmic, and data-structure skills.
  • Proficiency in one or more languages (e.g., Python, Go) and scripting.
  • Experience with messaging, caches (e.g., Redis, RocksDB), time-series stores, and data pipelines.
  • Proven track record of leading architecture and scaling core systems under high load, especially in an ads, ranking, or ML serving context.
  • Excellent communication skills, ability to influence cross-organizational stakeholders.
  • Proven track record of delivering features end-to-end and can ship products and features lightning-fast without sacrificing quality.
  • Strong ownership instincts — capable of driving projects from inception to production and beyond.
  • The ability to pick up on new technologies very quickly.
  • Startup experience at a high-growth company — working in fast-paced, rapidly evolving product environments with frequent experimentation (nice to have).
  • Experience with ads systems (bidding, auction, attribution, measurement, etc.), infrastructure, and international commerce (nice to have).
Benefits
  • Health insurance
  • Retirement plans
  • Paid time off
  • Flexible work arrangements
  • Professional development opportunities

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard skills
distributed systemshigh-throughput serviceslow-latency servicesstream processingsoftware designalgorithmic skillsdata-structure skillsPythonGomessaging
Soft skills
communication skillsinfluenceownership instinctsmentoringleadershipcross-functional collaborationproblem-solvingtechnical evangelismadaptabilityfast-paced environment experience
Certifications
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Scienceequivalent work experience