Data Engineer Jobs at Whatnot with Visa Sponsorship
Data Engineer jobs at Whatnot sit at the intersection of real-time commerce and large-scale infrastructure, where teams build the pipelines that power live shopping at scale. Whatnot has a consistent track record of sponsoring international talent across multiple visa categories for this function.
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Location
San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Seattle, WA
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Engineering Data & Marketplace Integrity
Compensation
* $200K – $275K
The salary or hourly rate range may be inclusive of several levels that would be applicable to the position. Final salary or hourly rate will be based on a number of factors including, level, relevant prior experience, skills, and expertise. This range is only inclusive of base salary or hourly rate, not benefits or equity.
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. Whether it's trading cards, fashion, electronics, or live plants, our sellers are building real businesses across hundreds of categories. We're building live commerce at a scale that's never been done in the West, and there's no playbook to copy. The people here are shaping how an entirely new industry develops.
As a remote co-located team, we're inspired by our values and anchored in hubs across the US, UK, Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Australia. We move fast, stay close to our users, and focus on the work that drives the most impact.
We're one of the fastest growing marketplaces and were recently named the #1 Best Startup Employer in America by Forbes. 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
The Data Platform team at Whatnot builds services that improve our core product experience and unlock meaningful business value. In this role, you will:
- Define technical direction and lead development of critical data platform systems that power next-generation capabilities at Whatnot
- Lead the buildout and evolution of our data orchestration and streaming platforms, helping drive them from early platform investment to production-ready usage across the company
- Design scalable, reliable, multi-tenant data infrastructure rather than simply building pipelines on top of an existing platform
- Own core platform concerns including scalability, performance, reliability, SLOs, and operational excellence for data processing systems
- Build high-quality systems that support real-time analytics, event-driven applications, and machine learning infrastructure needs across Whatnot
- Make key decisions about how data systems should be integrated across Whatnot, and then partner cross-functionally to bring that architecture to life
- Collaborate closely with engineering partners across product, platform, machine learning, and data to enable fast, safe, and scalable development
- Help shape broader company architecture across orchestration, stream processing, real-time systems, analytics, and content understanding
- Apply DevOps/SRE practices, including CI/CD, infrastructure automation, monitoring, and incident response, to keep platform systems reliable at scale
- Help define and enforce data governance and compliance standards across our data lake and downstream systems
You
As our next Software Engineer, Data Platform, you should have 8+ years of experience, plus:
- Ability to write well-tested, API-driven applications and services that run at scale in production
- Track record of building scalable, high-performance distributed systems
- Strong experience with streaming data systems (e.g., Kafka, Flink, or Pulsar) and/or orchestration platforms (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, or Temporal), with particular strength in building or evolving the platform layer itself, not just downstream pipelines
- Hands-on experience designing and operating stateful, real-time data pipelines at scale, including concepts like checkpointing, state management, and watermarking
- Experience evaluating architectural tradeoffs in data processing and orchestration systems, including when a given tool is the right solution and when it is not
- Experience building multi-tenant or end-to-end data infrastructure that supports multiple teams or production use cases
- Expertise in managing cloud data stores (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.) and data lake architectures (e.g., AWS S3) for processing and serving data products
- Strong experience supporting operational systems to ensure uptime, reliability, and maintainability, including monitoring, alerting, and incident management
- Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and CI/CD tooling, including GitHub and GitHub Actions
- Understanding of data governance and compliance principles (e.g., data access controls, retention policies, auditability)
In addition to these role-specific qualifications, all engineering team members are expected to have:
- Experience managing cloud technologies (AWS or Google Cloud) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code approaches (for example, Terraform)
- Proficiency in at least one server-side programming language (preferably Python), common algorithms and data structures, and software design principles
- Self-starter ethic, with the ability to thrive under a high level of autonomy
- Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills
Benefits
Generous Holiday and Time off Policy
* 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
* All Whatnauts are expected to develop a deep understanding of our product. We're passionate about building the best user experience, and all employees are expected to use Whatnot as both a buyer and a seller as part of their job (our dogfooding budget makes this fun and easy!)
* 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.
Compensation Range: $200K - $275K
See all 38+ Data Engineer Jobs at Whatnot
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Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Data Engineer Jobs at Whatnot
Tailor your portfolio to live commerce data
Whatnot's engineering work centers on real-time event streams, auction mechanics, and marketplace transactions. Highlight pipeline projects involving streaming data tools like Kafka or Spark, not just batch ETL work, to match what their teams are building.
Confirm your visa type before applying
Whatnot sponsors multiple visa categories including H-1B, E-3, TN, and F-1 OPT. Before you apply, verify that your specific status is supported so you can address it confidently during recruiter screens rather than discovering a mismatch at the offer stage.
Use Migrate Mate to filter Data Engineer roles by sponsorship type
Not every open role at Whatnot lists sponsorship details in the job posting. Use Migrate Mate to filter specifically for Whatnot Data Engineer openings by your visa category so you're targeting roles where your status is already confirmed eligible.
Prepare for LCA wage tier discussions early
For H-1B and E-3 filings, your employer submits a Labor Condition Application to the DOL certifying the offered wage meets prevailing levels. Knowing the DOL wage tiers for data engineering in Whatnot's location helps you evaluate offers before signing.
Align your degree field to the specialty occupation standard
USCIS requires a direct relationship between your degree field and the role. For data engineering, degrees in computer science, information systems, or applied mathematics are the clearest fit. An unrelated degree could trigger a Request for Evidence even with strong work experience.
Time your OPT or CPT start date around Whatnot's hiring cycles
Retail-adjacent tech companies like Whatnot often ramp hiring before key commerce seasons. If you're on F-1 OPT, coordinate your authorization start date to align with those windows so your work eligibility is active when offers are being extended.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Whatnot sponsor H-1B visas for Data Engineers?
Yes, Whatnot sponsors H-1B visas for Data Engineer roles. Because the H-1B requires a specialty occupation with a direct degree-to-role match, you'll want to ensure your educational background aligns clearly with the engineering function, typically computer science, data science, or a related technical field. Whatnot has sponsored across multiple visa categories, making it an active participant in employment-based immigration for this function.
How do I apply for Data Engineer jobs at Whatnot?
Applications go through Whatnot's careers page, where roles are listed by team and function. For international candidates, filtering by sponsorship eligibility before applying saves time. Migrate Mate is the recommended tool to browse Whatnot's open Data Engineer positions with visa sponsorship confirmed, so you're only applying to roles where your status is already a known fit.
Which visa types does Whatnot commonly use for Data Engineer roles?
Whatnot sponsors several categories for Data Engineer positions, including H-1B, E-3 visa (for Australian citizens), TN visa (for Canadian and Mexican nationals under USMCA), F-1 OPT and CPT for students, J-1 visa for exchange visitors, and employment-based Green Card pathways including EB-2 and EB-3. The right category depends on your nationality, degree, and current status.
What qualifications does Whatnot expect from Data Engineer candidates?
Whatnot's data engineering roles typically require a bachelor's degree or higher in computer science, engineering, or a related technical discipline, plus hands-on experience with distributed data systems, cloud infrastructure, and stream processing. Given Whatnot's real-time commerce platform, familiarity with high-throughput data pipelines and tools like Kafka, dbt, or Spark is particularly relevant. Strong SQL and Python skills are expected across levels.
How do I manage timing between my visa filing and a Data Engineer start date at Whatnot?
For H-1B transfers or new cap-subject petitions, USCIS premium processing can reduce adjudication to around 15 business days, which gives both you and Whatnot more certainty on a start date. For F-1 OPT, your EAD must be in hand before you begin work. Aligning your authorization window with the offer timeline is something to raise directly with Whatnot's recruiting team during the offer stage.