Software Engineer (Python, API)

Role Overview

Software Engineer on the Data Platform team at Whatnot. You will help define the technical direction and lead development of essential data platform systems, focusing on building and evolving the company’s Flink streaming platform.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical vision and lead development of streaming/data platform systems.
• Build and evolve Flink-based infrastructure for stream processing from investment through production deployment.
• Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant streaming infrastructure.
• Own core platform concerns: scalability, performance, reliability, and operational excellence.
• Develop systems supporting real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and machine learning infrastructure.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (product, platform, machine learning, data) to enable rapid, safe, scalable delivery.
• Contribute to broader company architecture around stream processing, real-time systems, and content understanding.

Requirements

• 5+ years software engineering experience, building scalable, high-performance distributed systems.
• Strong ability to build well-tested, API-driven backend services that run at scale in production.
• Expertise with streaming systems such as Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar, especially platform layer development.
• Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful real-time pipelines (checkpointing, state management, watermarking).
• Ability to evaluate architectural tradeoffs in stream processing (including when to use Flink).
• Experience operating cloud data stores for processing/serving: Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift.
• Experience supporting operational systems with monitoring, alerting, and incident management.
• Knowledge of AWS or Google Cloud and Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).
• Proficiency in a server-side language, preferably Python, plus strong algorithms and software design principles.
• Ability to work autonomously in a fast-paced environment.

Nice-to-Haves

• None explicitly stated beyond the requirements; likely strong real-time streaming operations and platform ownership experience.