Hybrid Software Engineer, Infrastructure

at Whatnot

• Job title: Software Engineer, Infrastructure
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, Distributed Systems, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Krakow, Poland

About the role

• Software Engineer building reliable distributed systems and services for Whatnot’s hybrid workforce. Focused on improving system reliability while collaborating with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• build distributed systems, services, and frameworks that improve the reliability of the entire platform
• focus on making reliability a built-in property of our systems as scale, traffic, and complexity continue to grow
• design, build, and operate reliability-focused components, services, and frameworks
• shape the standards and practices that guide how software is built and run across Whatnot
• partner closely with product, platform, and infrastructure teams to embed reliability concerns into system design, development workflows, and runtime behavior
• design and operate traffic control mechanisms, including circuit breakers, rate limiting, backpressure, and graceful degradation
• build and evolve load testing frameworks that validate system behavior under sustained, burst, and peak event traffic patterns
• build chaos and resilience testing frameworks to proactively surface failure modes and validate recovery behavior
• define and implement SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets that guide engineering teams toward the right reliability tradeoffs
• develop reliability tooling and services that improve incident detection, response, and automated mitigation
• review service architectures and designs with a focus on failure modes, scalability limits, and operational safety
• participate in incident response and drive post incident follow ups that reduce repeated failure patterns through systemic fixes

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a software engineer working on large scale distributed systems
• Strong fundamentals in designing, building, and operating shared production services and frameworks
• Experience with traffic control mechanisms such as circuit breakers and rate limiting
• Experience building or operating load testing and chaos testing frameworks
• Hands on experience with observability, monitoring, and debugging production systems
• Experience working with SLOs, error budgets, and incident response processes
• Comfortable in cloud native environments such as AWS or GCP with Kubernetes and infrastructure as code
• Strong collaborator with clear written and verbal communication skills
• Bonus: experience with high traffic, real time, or event driven systems

Benefits

• flexibility to work from home or from one of our global office hubs
• in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection