Software Engineer, AI Dev Tools

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

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Developer Tools team and be a primary contributor of our AI Tooling work end-to-end. In this role, you will build and own the AI tooling that shapes how Whatnot’s engineering organization—and increasingly, non-engineering teams—write code, ship software, and operate systems faster and more effectively.

This is not a machine learning or data science role. You won’t be training models—you’ll be building the tooling, infrastructure, and workflows that allow AI coding agents and assistants to operate effectively within Whatnot’s codebase and processes. You should be deeply familiar with the current generation of AI development tools, especially tools provided by the big 3 LLM companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) and have broad knowledge of other AI and LLM products and services.

Critically, you must be a strong software engineer first. You’ll serve as the primary interface between the Developer Tools team and Whatnot’s AI Tooling Working Group—a cross-functional community group that tracks the bleeding-edge frontier of AI tooling. You’ll gather feedback, identify high-impact opportunities, and feed that context into the team’s roadmap and build priorities.

You will work on all aspects of AI tooling, including:

• Building and shipping AI tooling across the full spectrum—from near-term developer productivity wins to long-term autonomous agent capabilities—while helping shape what we prioritize next based on what you see working (and not working) on the ground
• Designing and building sandboxed, containerized environments where AI agents can operate autonomously—running code, executing tests, and iterating on solutions with appropriate guardrails
• Building multi-agent orchestration systems and workflows, including CI-fixing agents, SRE context agents, and other autonomous AI capabilities that reduce toil and accelerate delivery
• Enabling non-engineers (PMs, designers, operations) to leverage AI tools effectively through purpose-built workflows, onboarding experiences, and low-code/no-code interfaces
• Building and optimizing AI-aware developer infrastructure: CLAUDE.md configurations, MCP servers, prompt engineering frameworks, and context management systems that make AI assistants more effective in our codebase
• Deploying, monitoring, and maintaining the infrastructure supporting AI tools and workflows to ensure high availability, performance, and reliability for the organization.
• Evaluating and integrating emerging AI tools and platforms as the landscape evolves—staying ahead of the curve and bringing the best of the ecosystem into Whatnot

This is a high-visibility, high-autonomy role. You’ll have significant ownership over a space that is evolving rapidly, is a top strategic priority for Whatnot’s engineering leadership, and directly shapes how our engineers work every day.

We offer flexibility to work from home or our office hub, and we value in-person time for planning, problem-solving, and connection. Team members in this role must live within commuting distance of our Los Angeles or San Francisco hubs.

You

People who do well at Whatnot tend to be comfortable figuring things out as they go, biased toward action, and genuinely curious about what they’re building. They care more about outcomes than credit and stay close to the product and the people using it.

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, w…