Database Engineer

🚀 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. 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. With hubs in the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, and Germany, we’re building the future of online marketplaces—together.

From fashion, beauty, and electronics to rare 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, we’re looking for bold, forward-thinking problem solvers across all functional areas. 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

At Whatnot, our Database Engineers play a pivotal role in designing, implementing, and optimizing our database systems to support rapid feature development and ensure platform reliability. As our business scales at an unprecedented pace, we are investing in world-class database infrastructure to keep up with our ambitious growth goals.

We foster a highly collaborative culture, where database engineers work closely with product teams to build scalable, high-performance systems. Our software team enjoys significant autonomy and responsibility, so we’re looking for trusted engineers who can translate business strategy into robust database architectures.

What you’ll do:

• Own the performance, scalability, and reliability of our Postgres-based data layer, a mission-critical component of our infrastructure.
• Design and implement scalable database architectures, optimizing queries, tuning indexes, and refining schemas for efficiency.
• Drive long-term strategy for horizontal scaling, ensuring our systems grow alongside the business.
• Ensure high availability and fault tolerance, leading database upgrades, migrations, and capacity planning.
• Establish and promote best practices for data access patterns, security, and database operations.

Team members in this role are required to be within commuting distance of our San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Los Angeles, CA, or New York, NY hubs.

👋 About You

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 5+ years of relational database engineering experience; Postgres experience preferred.
• Experience with database optimization, migrations, schema refinement, indexing, and query tuning.
• Prior operational experience with database horizontal scaling strategies is nice to have.
• Knowledge of NoSQL databases (DynamoDB etc).
• Experience in a public cloud environment (AWS, GCP).
• Previous experience at a hyper-growth startup. You’re an excellent problem solver and a self-starter who can hit the ground running with little direction.
• Excellent ability to understand product requirements in the context of a scalable platform. You first think about users rather than the best technical solution.

💰Compensation

For Full-Time (Salary) US-based applicants: $185,000 - $245,000/year + benefits + equity

The salary range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary, not benefits (more details below) or equity.

🎁 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
• 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.