Whatnot - Engineering Manager, Orders Platform

• Lead and grow a team of engineers responsible for systems that support hundreds of millions of orders globally, from creation through post-fulfillment. • Own building and operations for our global Orders Platform, a business-critical area at the center of buyer, seller, and internal operational workflows. Own the core order lifecycle across live and async channels, ensuring orders can be created, completed, and recovered reliably. • Partner with senior engineers across Payments, Marketplace and Fraud teams on technical direction, staying close enough to challenge designs, make trade-offs, and keep the team focused on the right architecture. • Drive reliability and scale across the architecture • Ensure customer experiences are amazing and helpful - and maintain a high bar for correctness in recovery, refunds, cancellations, and terminal-state handling. • Partner closely with CX, Seller, Marketing, Finance, Tax, and admin surface owners on the internal tooling and workflows that depend on Orders Platform. • Maintain strong operating mechanisms for the team: planning, execution visibility, on-call, incident response, rollout discipline, and accountability for production behavior. • 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 the New York City hub. • 👋 You • In addition to embodying our cultural principles, great candidates will also have: • Strong experience in backend or platform engineering, along with experience managing engineering teams in fast-moving environments. • A track record operating high-scale systems where reliability, correctness, and user trust matter. • Experience with complex order, transaction, or workflow-heavy systems, including state machines, asynchronous processing, or distributed jobs. • Strong technical judgment. You should be able to challenge designs, understand failure modes, and guide good engineering trade-offs. • A high bar for engineering and operational excellence, with deep care for safe execution, observability, ownership, and production quality. • The ability to set clear direction, translate business needs into focused priorities, and keep a team executing through ambiguity. • Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to work effectively across engineering, product, CX, finance, seller-facing teams, and operations. • Experience hiring, developing, and retaining strong engineers while building a transparent, accountable, and collaborative team culture. • Comfort operating at the intersection of customer experience, internal operations, and financial correctness. • Whatnot's backend runs on Python and Elixir, with Go used for performance-sensitive components. Direct experience with any of these is a plus; equally strong candidates from other modern backend stacks who are eager to learn are welcome.